Frederick Vanbrabant has posted an interesting article to his site covering the "broken windows" theory, what it is and how it shows that some projects are just destined to suck.

Why is it that most legacy software projects are not really fun to work on? How can we stop that greenfield project to turn into one of those dull big projects? I would argue that it’s all in the foundation.

He starts with a brief description of the "broken windows" theory based on the 1982 definition proposed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kellin. Basically it states that all it takes is one "broken window" to change the perceived value of something, even if it's a small thing. He then gets down to the code level and relates it back to some examples from the Slim framework project. In his examples he shows how it might look after a refactor and how removing best practices makes it harder to understand (breaking windows). To help prevent it, he recommends following the Boy Scout rule of leaving the code better than you found it and using automation to help find and fix the issues.