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Aug 16Classic WTF: The Big Ball of Yarn
by in Feature Articles on 2016-09-05It's Labor Day in the US, so we're taking the day off to grill something before the weather turns horrid. While I was finding legacy articles to support the Your Code Might Be Unmaintainable… article, I noticed this classic, and knew that I wanted to re-run it again soon. - Remy
Not too long ago, I posted The Enterprise Dependency. Essentially, it was a visual depiction of a good ole' enterprise framework that was "several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory." Inspired by the diagram, commenter "LieutenantFrost" shared his own "enterprise-ness and despair" with a dependency diagram that looks somewhat like an anglerfish.
But that got me thinking: like a Representative Line, perhaps dependency diagrams can help provide some insight into the pain that large applications' maintainers face each day. And just then, Jan-Hendrik sent in such a diagram. Note that each little box represents a class, and a line is its dependency to another class.