The AntiPattern Season in Review

We have marched through 31 examples during this antipattern season.  Therefore, we have enough of them to step back and look at themes, bad habits, and commonalities.  While it is helpful to know about the individual patterns, it is better to see the big picture approaches we should avoid.  Let's get to beating some dead horses.

Communication Is Key

We can do everything right and still end up down a dark hole if we fail to communicate.  This recommendation involves vertical communication among staff and management as well as horizontal across roles.  We also want to be sure that we have made context and our "why" clear as part of the communication.  Provide a good map and give it to the team.  If you fail to create a good map or fail to give it to the team then the destination they arrive at may be surprising.

Embrace Change

The modern business world moves fast and changes often.  IT is at the forefront of this controlled chaos.  Thus, you need to plan for change and be ready to adjust as often as needed.  That requires our plans to be flexible, but also our tools and processes.  The perfect tool for our current project may be practically useless for the next one.  We want to learn from our experiences without getting tied tightly to them.

Smell The Roses

While smelling the roses does not help our productivity, stopping and considering our path does.  We all want to get the solution out the door as fast as possible.  However, the phrase about fools rushing in is very pertinent to our work.  When we dive in without design and thinking through a solution we are far more likely to end up spinning our wheels.  There are always dead ends and rabbit trails we can wander down.  The time lost by these can be reduced with some time sent planning our approach to implementation even down to a detailed level.  Therefore, things like pseudo-coding can be very valuable.  Use this antipattern season to embrace new habits and become a better developer.

If nothing else, take a look back at the anti-patterns we have covered.