A while back, I posted The Enterprise Dependency and then Big Ball of Yarn. They were both visual depictions of a good ole' enterprise framework that was "several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory. So, continuing in the tradition of the Representative Line, here's another representative dependency diagrams offers some insight into the pain that large applications' maintainers face each day.

"Someone was able to convince management that our software system needed a massive rewrite," notes Bob, "so, management commissioned the Next Generation project. After two years, it's turned into an over-architected abomination with over 1700 classes, and still growing. It is only half-functional so far, but it's in production and is replacing an easy-to-support legacy system which had around 100 classes."

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