When designers are faced with a choice between building something elegant from the ground up, or undermining the architecture of the existing system to quickly address a problem, architecture usually loses. This might be thought of as messy kitchen phase, during which pieces of the system are scattered across the counter, awaiting an eventual cleanup. The danger is that the clean up is never done. With real kitchens, the board of health will eventually intervene. With software, alas, there is seldom any corresponding agency to police such squalor.
Uncontrolled growth can ultimately be a malignant force.
The result of neglecting to contain it can be a BIG BALL OF MUD . Brand noted that Function melts form , and low road buildings are more amenable to such change. Similarly, with software, you may be reluctant to desecrate another programmer's cathedral. Expedient changes to a low road system that exhibits no discernable architectural pretensions to begin with are easier to rationalize. Piecemeal Growth is based on the idea of repair .