Anti-patterns are on the opposite side of the design pattern and are undesirable according to the blog “Anti-Patterns in Software Development That You Should Avoid”. Another term to describe Anti-patterns are called Design Smells.
The blog goes over the concept of the Golden Hammer anti pattern which occurs when using a familiar solution to attack an unfamiliar problem. Sometime it might work out, but most of the time it’s an inefficient way to solve problems.
The Golden Hammer anti-pattern is a concept that can shared in every aspect of life. Like for example, as mentioned in the blog some people tend to have their solution ready before understanding the problem like a doctor prescribing while the patient is still telling about the symptoms.
In software development, each design pattern is basically suited for its targeted problem. But it’s really easy to use the same framework, the same programming language, and the same design pattern for almost every problem. Like similar to the doctors example, some doctors might prescribe Ibuprofen to help a certain health but it might not completely relieve or heal that issue completely.
And so the Golden hammer could lead to; Poorly performing code, Overly complicated code, Redundant code. To avoid this anti-pattern it is best to find all potential solutions for one problem and benchmark them. List down all PROS and CONS for each solution then choose the better one.
Another anti-pattern is the God Class which for the most part controls many other classes, takes many responsibilities as well as lots of dependencies. An application could be well designed at the beginning so that there aren’t God classes but eventually dominant, very well specified classes will turn into God classes at some point.
The big ball of mud is a very common anti-pattern that happens when the solutions/application lacks a perceivable, flexible, suitable architecture as defined in the blog. A ball of mud will have, haphazardly and sloppy structure without coding comments, contains many God classes with more than 6000 lines of code, static variables/functions everywhere, methods being overloaded several times, and code duplications.
This anti-pattern is dangerous because it could happen while writing the application. Once we can’t refactor the code anymore, then we have to rewrite the entire thing. There are many reason why this anti-pattern could be brought up. It could be due to the frequent changes and requirements that the application might need, the deadline is near and the project is rushed, new developer are being brought in, or being too narrow minded about the design architecture that was initially brought in.
There are many more anti-patterns when it comes to the software development process, these are just the most common ones to date.
Link to blog: https://medium.com/geekculture/anti-patterns-in-software-development-that-you-should-avoid-780841ce4f1d
From the blog CS@Worcester – FindKelvin by Kelvin Nina and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.