The named ways it goes wrong

someone named the shape you had just described and the argument stopped, because everyone had seen it before.

Anti-pattern

you traced the control flow with a finger and it went up, down and into a file you did not expect, twice.

Spaghetti code

the code drifts right for six levels and back again, and the shape of it on screen is a wide arrowhead.

Arrow anti-pattern

the bug was fixed in one of the four near-identical blocks, and reported again a month later from the other three.

Copy-paste programming

there is a 3 in the middle of the expression and nobody left a note saying which three that is.

Magic number

the status is a string, the comparison was misspelled, and the branch silently never ran.

Stringly typed

money is a decimal, the email is a string, and the validation for both is repeated in nine call sites.

Primitive obsession

the call reads createUser(name, true, false) and you have to open the definition to find out what either means.

Boolean trap

the method takes nine arguments, four of them are the same type, and you got two of them the wrong way round.

Long parameter list

the method calls five getters on another object and one on itself, so it belongs on that other object.

Feature envy

the line is four dots long and a change to any object along the way breaks the code at the end of it.

Message chain

the service method's whole body is a call to the repository method with the same name and the same arguments.

Pass-through method

the class exists only to call one method on another class and then disappears, and it has Manager in its name.

Poltergeist

the same class is edited for tax rules, for the export format and for the retry policy, by three different people.

Divergent change

adding one field meant small edits in eleven files, and the review caught the two you missed.

Shotgun surgery

the subclass overrides three inherited methods to throw, because it never wanted them in the first place.

Refused bequest

understanding one method meant opening five files up and down the hierarchy, and then going back up again.

Yo-yo problem

the test passed alone and failed in the suite, and the difference was something another test had left behind.

Global mutable state

the class needed an environment variable, a file on disk and the current time, and its constructor took nothing.

Hidden dependency

two modules import each other, and which one is initialised first decides whether it works.

Circular dependency

there is an interface with one implementation and a config flag that has never been anything but its default.

Premature abstraction

the annotation is on every class because it was on the first one, and nobody can say what it does.

Cargo cult programming

the configuration grew conditionals and loops, and you realised you had written a programming language, badly.

Inner-platform effect

you changed the function, everything passed, and it turned out nothing had called it for a year.

Dead code

the old implementation is still there behind a flag nobody has turned on since the migration two years ago.

Lava flow

the component is fully wired in, fully maintained, and used by exactly nothing, kept because it might be needed.

Boat anchor

the first ignored warning became forty, because after the first one nobody felt the file was worth keeping tidy.

Broken window