Many non-trivial systems end up as a big ball of mud, not because developers are lazy or reckless, but because it is very hard to avoid that outcome without proper tooling. For example, if your architecture rules are spread by word of mouth or some articles in your company wiki, there is no way of knowing if the code actually conforms to any of your architecture rules. If rules are broken, most of the times developers are not aware of that. That will lead to the erosion of architectural boundaries (if they ever existed) and more and more cyclic dependency groups. In the beginning the cyclic groups start small, but they grow like cancer in your codebase. I actually did some research on that by tracking some open source projects over time. That research confirmed my assumption – if you do not address the problem of ever growing cyclic dependency groups things will only get worse over time, in some cases much worse.
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