The anti-pattern pattern

An anti-pattern is a repeated action, process or structure that appears beneficial initially, but ultimately produces negitive consequences.

More than a just a bad practice. Anti-patterns masquerade as a solution while conceling the extensive damage its doing for years. Once these patters surface it’s often with catastrophic concenquences.

Organizational anti-patterns

• Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
• Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
• Matrix Management: Unfocused organizational structure that results in divided loyalties and lack of direction
• Stovepipe or Silos: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
• Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component

Project Management anti-patterns

• Groupthink: During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.
• Software bloat: Allowing successive versions of a system to demand ever more resources
• Waterfall model: An older method of software development that inadequately deals with unanticipated change

Software Design anti-patterns

• Big ball of mud: A system with no recognizable structure
• Database-as-IPC: Using a database as the message queue for routine interprocess communication where a much more lightweight mechanism would be suitable
• Gold plating: Continuing to work on a task or project well past the point where extra effort fails to add value
• Input kludge: Failing to specify and implement the handling of possibility of invalid input
• Magic pushbutton: Coding implementation logic directly within interface code, without using abstraction
• Stovepipe system: A barely maintainable assemblage of ill-related components

Programming anti-patterns

• Accidental complexity: Introducing unnecessary complexity into a solution
• Boat anchor: Retaining a part of a system that no longer has any use
• Busy spin: Locking a page and consuming CPU while waiting for something to happen, usually waiting for a task to finish processing.
• Error hiding: Catching an error message before it can be shown to the user and either showing nothing or showing a meaningless message
• Hard code: Embedding assumptions about the environment of a system in its implementation
• Lava flow: Retaining undesirable (redundant or low-quality) code because removing it is too expensive or has unpredictable consequences
• Magic numbers: Including unexplained numbers in algorithms
• Spaghetti code: Programs whose structure is barely comprehensible, especially when misuseing code structures

Methodological anti-patterns

• Copy and paste programming: Copying (and modifying) existing code rather than creating reuseable solutions
• Improbability factor: Assuming that it is improbable that a known error will occur
• Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome: The tendency towards reinventing the wheel (Failing to adopt an existing, adequate solution)
• Tester Driven Development: Software projects in which new requirements are specified in bug reports