Antipatterns (retrieved 2-14-10). Also see
programming bugs.
Organizational anti-patterns
- Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
- Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
- Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
- Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
- Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
- Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
- Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
- 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
- Death march: Everyone knows that the project is going to be a disaster – except the CEO. However, the truth remains hidden and the project is artificially kept alive until the Day Zero finally comes ("Big Bang"). Alternative definition: Employees are pressured to work late nights and weekends on a project with an unreasonable deadline.
- Groupthink: During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.
- Smoke and mirrors: Demonstrating how unimplemented functions will appear
- Software bloat: Allowing successive versions of a system to demand ever more resources
Analysis anti-patterns
- Bystander apathy: When a requirement or design decision is wrong, but the people who notice this do nothing because it affects a larger number of people.
Software design anti-patterns
- Abstraction inversion: Not exposing implemented functionality required by users, so that they re-implement it using higher level functions
- Ambiguous viewpoint: Presenting a model (usually OOAD) without specifying its viewpoint
- 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
- Gas factory: An unnecessarily complex design
- Gold plating: Continuing to work on a task or project well past the point at which extra effort is adding value
- Inner-platform effect: A system so customizable as to become a poor replica of the software development platform
- Input kludge: Failing to specify and implement handling of possibly invalid input
- Interface bloat: Making an interface so powerful that it is extremely difficult to implement
- Magic pushbutton: Coding implementation logic directly within interface code, without using abstraction.
- Race hazard: Failing to see the consequence of different orders of events
- Stovepipe system: A barely maintainable assemblage of ill-related components
Object-oriented design anti-patterns
- Anemic Domain Model: The use of domain model without any business logic which is not OOP because each object should have both attributes and behaviors
- BaseBean: Inheriting functionality from a utility class rather than delegating to it
- Call super: Requiring subclasses to call a superclass's overridden method
- Circle-ellipse problem: Subtyping variable-types on the basis of value-subtypes
- Circular dependency: Introducing unnecessary direct or indirect mutual dependencies between objects or software modules
- Constant interface: Using interfaces to define constants
- God object: Concentrating too many functions in a single part of the design (class)
- Object cesspool: Reusing objects whose state does not conform to the (possibly implicit) contract for re-use
- Object orgy: Failing to properly encapsulate objects permitting unrestricted access to their internals
- Poltergeists: Objects whose sole purpose is to pass information to another object
- Sequential coupling: A class that requires its methods to be called in a particular order
- Yo-yo problem: A structure (e.g., of inheritance) that is hard to understand due to excessive fragmentation
Programming anti-patterns
- Accidental complexity: Introducing unnecessary complexity into a solution
- Action at a distance: Unexpected interaction between widely separated parts of a system
- Blind faith: Lack of checking of (a) the correctness of a bug fix or (b) the result of a subroutine
- Boat anchor: Retaining a part of a system that no longer has any use
- Busy spin: Consuming CPU while waiting for something to happen, usually by repeated checking instead of messaging
- Caching failure: Forgetting to reset an error flag when an error has been corrected
- Cargo cult programming: Using patterns and methods without understanding why
- Coding by exception: Adding new code to handle each special case as it is recognized
- Error hiding: Catching an error message before it can be shown to the user and either showing nothing or showing a meaningless message
- Expection handling: (a portmanteau of expect and exception) Using a language's error handling system to implement normal program logic
- 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[5][6]
- Loop-switch sequence: Encoding a set of sequential steps using a loop over a switch statement
- Magic numbers: Including unexplained numbers in algorithms
- Magic strings: Including literal strings in code, for comparisons, as event types etc.
- Soft code: Storing business logic in configuration files rather than source code[7]
- Spaghetti code: Systems whose structure is barely comprehensible, especially because of misuse of code structures
Methodological anti-patterns
- Copy and paste programming: Copying (and modifying) existing code rather than creating generic solutions
- Golden hammer: Assuming that a favorite solution is universally applicable (See: Silver Bullet)
- Improbability factor: Assuming that it is improbable that a known error will occur
- Premature optimization: Coding early-on for perceived efficiency, sacrificing good design, maintainability, and sometimes even real-world efficiency
- Programming by permutation (or "programming by accident"): Trying to approach a solution by successively modifying the code to see if it works
- Reinventing the wheel: Failing to adopt an existing, adequate solution
- Silver bullet: Assuming that a favorite technical solution can solve a larger process or problem
- Tester Driven Development: Software projects in which new requirements are specified in bug reports
Configuration management anti-patterns
- Dependency hell: Problems with versions of required products
- DLL hell: Inadequate management of dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), specifically on Microsoft Windows
- Extension conflict: Problems with different extensions to pre-Mac OS X versions of the Mac OS attempting to patch the same parts of the operating system
- JAR hell: Overutilization of the multiple JAR files, usually causing versioning and location problems because of misunderstanding of the Java class loading model
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