Smoke and Mirrors
The practice of showing a customer “smoke and mirrors” and then hoping the engineers or developers can build it has been around for as long as sales and marketing people have had jobs. As long as what’s being sold can … Continued
Feature Creep
Many software products die an earlier death than necessary because of feature creep, by which additional bits of functionality are continually added. Feature creep (also commonly known as scope creep) is often responsible for delays in shipping or delivering software, … Continued
Frankencode
Frankencode refers to code that was never designed to work together, being pulled into a single application and held together with duct tape, baling wire, and maybe some Adapter design pattern usage. While software reuse and composability are desirable, frequently … Continued
Duct Tape Coder
The Duct Tape Coder is someone who is able to cobble together software that solves the immediate problem, but without any concern for the code’s quality or maintainability. Sometimes, a bit of duct tape is exactly what the situation calls … Continued
The Blob
The Blob is an anti-pattern that describes a class which resembles the monster from the 1958 film The Blob, which absorbs anything it touches and grows larger and larger over time. Such classes are similar to God Objects and over … Continued
Iceberg Class
Although encapsulation is an oft-sited good thing to have in a design, there are many cases in which hiding an abundance of implementation behind private methods is undesirable. Often, this behavior is beyond the actual scope of the class in … Continued
Walking Through a Minefield
When software is released before it is ready, and users of the software are made to find all of its bugs and shortcomings, they’re made to feel as though they’re walking in a minefield. It’s important to release software as … Continued
Reinventing the Wheel
It’s common for software developers and some organizations to prefer to write something they may need for a given project themselves, rather than using an available open source or commercial offering. Generally, it’s best to avoid this urge unless the … Continued
Flags Over Objects
The Flags Over Objects anti-pattern occurs when behavior is written outside of an object by inspecting flags (such as status codes), rather than within the object itself. This violates the Tell, Don’t Ask principle, and results in chatty interfaces and … Continued
Copy Folder Versioning
Copy Folder Versioning is a software development anti-pattern in which source code is updated by simply making copies of the folder in which the code currently resides. This results in a tangled mess of folders, usually without any clear indication … Continued