antipattern

The Shiny Toy anti-pattern refers to the practice of always thinking today’s problems can all be solved by the latest bleeding-edge tool, technique, or library. While it’s true, the software industry is constantly trying to improve and evolve, new approaches … Continued

Organizations and individuals who refuse to trust anything they didn’t create themselves spend important resources reinventing wheels and other commodities when they could be spending those resources on the key features that differentiate their product from its competitors. See Also … Continued

Code smells, or bad smells in code, refer to symptoms in code that may indicate deeper problems. They’re a diagnostic tool used when considering refactoring software to improve its design. Not all code smells should be “fixed” – sometimes code … Continued

Featured in the 2012 Software Craftsmanship AntiPatterns calendar, the Calendar Coder antipattern is a play on the notion of cargo cult programming.  The problem in both cases is the lack of thought and understanding on the part of the developer … Continued

Featured in the 2012 Software Craftsmanship AntiPatterns calendar, Spaghetti Code refers to that has a tangled and hard to follow structure, especially one in which following the actual flow of the program is difficult. Different programming languages have different constructs … Continued

The worst part of a Death March project is that virtually everybody involved with it knows it’s a death march project. The Death March refers to a project that has little or no hope of success. It’s already over-budget, over-schedule, … Continued

The Golden Hammer refers to a language, tool, or platform with which the developer is comfortable and productive, so they are tempted to use it for any problem that presents itself.  As the saying goes, “If all you have is … Continued

Having “One Thing To Rule Them All” can be an antipattern in many systems. Probably the most common example of this antipattern is “One Database to Rule Them All,” in which a single database is used by dozens of applications … Continued

Sometimes you need to make a change that’s similar to one you’ve made before, or you have some logic that’s performed in more than one location, and it needs to change.  The temptation, of course, is to simply copy the … Continued