jargon

Comparison

Big ball of mudvsGod object

Big ball of mud

you asked where the pricing logic lives and were told it depends which of five places you mean.

A system with no discernible structure, where everything can reach everything and the only way to know what a change affects is to run it. It is the most common architecture in the world because it is what accretes when nobody is empowered to say no to a shortcut. The relevant point in a review is that it is a destination, not an accident: each individual commit that built it looked fine.

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God object

one class is four thousand lines and every feature branch touches it.

One class or module that knows about and does far too much, so every change goes through it. It is the extreme of low cohesion and it has a distinctive organisational symptom: it is the file with the most merge conflicts and the one nobody wants to review. Splitting one is usually a months-long project, which is the argument for noticing at eight hundred lines rather than at four thousand.

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