research-article

Software process anti-patterns catalogue

Authors:

Petr PichaAuthors Info & Claims

EuroPLop '19: Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

Article No.: 28, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3361149.3361178

Published: 03 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

For software project managers and other practitioners, an important activity is to detect, and consequently find solutions to, insufficiencies and mistakes in process and other project management (PM) activities. Particularly interesting among these are anti-patterns: commonly occurring solutions with known negative effects. Their detection in running, as well as finished, projects is often hard as it needs to be performed by specialists, demands expertise and skill, and is prone to biases. Obtaining the expertise is a long-time effort and the sources of relevant knowledge are scattered and vary in the depth of treatment.

These issues could be alleviated by detecting PM and software process anti-patterns in data available in project Application Life-cycle Management tools. To facilitate the work towards such an approach, we have performed a review of academic, professional and grey literature sources to collect currently known and defined software PM anti-patterns. The collected set shows that they vary in terminology and description format which can lead to misunderstandings, different interpretations and other difficulties, especially when trying to devise a universally acceptable method of detection.

In this paper we describe the findings of the review and the design of a catalogue of PM and process anti-patterns, based on the knowledge obtained. It uses a description template designed to support data-driven detection of anti-pattern occurrence. An initial version of the catalogue has been made publicly accessible, with the aim to reconcile the various sources and foster community discussion on understanding and descriptions of the individual anti-patterns.

References

[1]

Scott W. Ambler. 1998. Process patterns: building large-scale systems using object technology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

[2]

Scott W. Ambler. 2012. The "Broken Iron Triangle" Software Development Anti-pattern. Online. http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/brokenTriangle.html. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[3]

Scott W. Ambler. 2014. Common Role Anti-Patterns in Online Discussion Forums. Online. http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/discussionListAntiPatterns.html. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[4]

Scott W. Ambler. 2014. The "Change Prevention Process" Anti-Pattern. Online. http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/changePrevention.html. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[5]

Dilem Aydinli. 2015. Software project management anti-patterns in innovation projects. Master's thesis. University of Tampere.

[6]

Dilem Aydinli, Eleni Berki, Timo Poranen, and Ioannis Stamelos. 2016. Management anti-patterns in IT innovation projects. In Proceedings of the 20th International Academic Mindtrek Conference. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--10.

Digital Library

[7]

William H. Brown, Raphael C. Malveau, Hays W. McCormick, and Thomas J. Mowbray. 1998. AntiPatterns: refactoring software, architectures, and projects in crisis. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA.

Digital Library

[8]

William J. Brown, Hays W. McCormick, and Scott W. Thomas. 2000. Anti-patterns project management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA.

[9]

Frank Buschmann, Regine Meunier, Hans Rohnert, Peter Sommerlad, and Michael Stal. 1996. A system of patterns: Pattern-oriented software architecture. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA.

Digital Library

[10]

Julieth Patricia Castellanos Ardila, Barbara Gallina, and Faiz U. L. Muram. 2018. Enabling Compliance Checking against Safety Standards from SPEM 2.0 Process Models. In The Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

[11]

Ward Cunningham. 2010. Management Anti Pattern Road Map. Online. http://wiki.c2.com/?ManagementAntiPatternRoadMap. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[12]

Ward Cunningham. 2013. Anti Patterns Catalog. Online. http://wiki.c2.com/?AntiPatternsCatalog. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[13]

Veli-Pekka Eloranta, Kai Koskimies, and Tommi Mikkonen. 2016. Exploring ScrumBut - An empirical study of Scrum anti-patterns. Information and Software Technology 74 (2016), 194--203.

Digital Library

[14]

Veli-Pekka Eloranta, Kai Koskimies, Tommi Mikkonen, and Jyri Vuorinen. 2013. Scrum Anti-Patterns - An Empirical Study. In Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), 2013 20th Asia-Pacific, Vol. 1. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 503--510.

[15]

Erich Gamma. 1995. Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software. Pearson Education India, Chennai, India.

[16]

Zhaogang Han, Peng Gong, Li Zhang, Jimin Ling, and Wenqing Huang. 2013. Definition and detection of control-flow anti-patterns in process models. In Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2013 IEEE 37th Annual. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 433--438.

Digital Library

[17]

Regina Hebig, Gregor Gabrysiak, and Holger Giese. 2012. Towards patterns for MDE-related processes to detect and handle changeability risks. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Process. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 38--47.

[18]

Andrew Koenig. 1998. Patterns and antipatterns. The patterns handbook: techniques, strategies, and applications 13 (1998), 383.

[19]

Yoshihito Kuranuki and Kenji Hiranabe. 2004. Antipractices: Antipatterns for XP practices. In Agile Development Conference, 2004. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 83--86.

[20]

Phillip A. Laplante and Colin J. Neill. 2005. Antipatterns: identification, refactoring, and management. Auerbach Publications, New York, NY, USA.

[21]

Livejournal. 2008. Antipatterns. Online. https://thespleen.livejournal.com/109833.html. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[22]

Nick Malik. 2006. Project Management AntiPattern - PMs who write specs. Online. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/nickmalik/2006/01/03/project-management-antipattern-pms-who-write-specs/. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[23]

Nick Malik. 2016. Project Management Antipattern 2: Pardon My Dust. Online. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/nickmalik/2006/01/19/project-management-antipattern-2-pardon-my-dust/. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[24]

Gerard Meszaros and Jim Doble. 1997. A pattern language for pattern writing. In Pattern languages of program design 3. Addison-Wesley Professional, Boston, MA, USA, 632.

[25]

Colin J. Neill. 2018. Effective Teams | Management Antipatterns - how NOT to manage teams. Online. http://www.personal.psu.edu/cjn6/Personal/Effective%20Teams.htm. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[26]

Object Management Group. 2008. Software & Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model Specification.

[27]

Francis Palma, Naouel Moha, and Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc. 2015. Specification and detection of business process antipatterns. In International Conference on E-Technologies. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, 37--52.

[28]

Fabio Palomba, Damian A. Tamburri, Alexander Serebrenik, Andy Zaidman, Francesca Arcelli Fontana, and Rocco Oliveto. 2018. How do community smells influence code smells?. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 240--241.

Digital Library

[29]

Petr Picha and Premek Brada. 2019. Software Process Anti-pattern Detection in Project Data. In EuroPLoP '19: Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs. ACM, New York, NY, USA.

[30]

Petr Picha, Premek Brada, Ralf Ramsauer, and Wolfgang Mauerer. 2017. Towards Architect's Activity Detection through a Common Model for Project Pattern Analysis. In Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW), 2017 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 175--178.

[31]

Charikleia Raptopoulou, Eleni Berki, Timo Poranen, Ioannis Stamelos, and Lefteris Aggelis. 2012. Management anti-patterns in finnish software industry. In Proceedings of the SQM/INSPIRE 2012 Conference. School of Information Sciences of the University of Tampere and the BCS, Tampere, Finland, 173--187.

[32]

Daniel Rodriguez, Israel Herraiz, and Rachel Harrison. 2012. On software engineering repositories and their open problems. In 2012 First International Workshop on Realizing AI Synergies in Software Engineering (RAISE). IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 52--56.

[33]

Dimitrios Settas, Stamatia Bibi, Panagiotis Sfetsos, Ioannis Stamelos, and Vassilis Gerogiannis. 2006. Using bayesian belief networks to model software project management antipatterns. In Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications, 2006. Fourth International Conference on. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 117--124.

[34]

Dimitrios Settas and Ioannis Stamelos. 2007. Towards a dynamic ontology based software project management antipattern intelligent system. In Tools with Artificial Intelligence, 2007. ICTAI 2007. 19th IEEE International Conference on, Vol. 1. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 186--193.

Digital Library

[35]

Dimitrios L. Settas, Georgios Meditskos, Ioannis G. Stamelos, and Nick Bassiliades. 2011. SPARSE: A symptom-based antipattern retrieval knowledge-based system using Semantic Web technologies. Expert Systems with Applications 38, 6 (2011), 7633--7646.

Digital Library

[36]

Pedro Silva, Ana M Moreno, and Lawrence Peters. 2015. Software Project Management: Learning from Our Mistakes. IEEE Software 32, 3 (May-June 2015), 40--43.

Digital Library

[37]

Sourcemaking.com. 2018. AntiPatterns. Online. https://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

[38]

Ioannis Stamelos. 2010. Software project management anti-patterns. Journal of Systems and Software 83, 1 (2010), 52--59.

Digital Library

[39]

Damian A. Tamburri, Fabio Palomba, Alexander Serebrenik, and Andy Zaidman. 2018. Discovering Community Patterns in Open-Source: A Systematic Approach and Its Evaluation. Empirical Software Engineering 23 (2018), 1--49.

[40]

Wikipedia. 2018. Anti-Pattern. Online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern. Accessed November 14th, 2018.

Cited By

Viviani LGuerra EMelegati JDaniel J(2023)Anti-patterns in managing uncertain Non-Functional RequirementsProceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3628034.3628067(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628034.3628067
Pícha PHönel SBrada PEricsson MLöwe WWingkvist ADaněk J(2022)Process anti-pattern detection – a case studyProceedings of the 27th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3551902.3551965(1-18)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551902.3551965
Ullmann GPolitowski CGuéhéneuc YPetrillo FMontandon J(2022)Video game project management anti-patternsProceedings of the 6th International ICSE Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering Fun, Inspiration, and Motivation10.1145/3524494.3527623(9-15)Online publication date: 20-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524494.3527623
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Software process anti-pattern detection in project data
EuroPLop '19: Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

There is a significant amount of guidance on Project Management (PM) including software development methodologies, best practices and anti-patterns (APs). There is, however, a lack of automated way of applying this knowledge by analyzing readily ...
Process anti-pattern detection – a case study
EuroPLop '22: Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

Anti-patterns are harmful phenomena repeatedly occurring, e.g., in software development projects. Though widely recognized and well-known, their descriptions are traditionally not fit for automated detection. The detection is usually performed by ...
Software performance antipatterns
WOSP '00: Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Software and performance

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

EuroPLop '19: Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

July 2019

431 pages

ISBN:9781450362061

DOI:10.1145/3361149

Conference Chair:
Tiago Boldt
sousa

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 July 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

EuroPLoP '19

EuroPLoP '19: 24th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

July 3 - 7, 2019

Irsee, Germany

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 216 of 354 submissions, 61%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
310
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Viviani LGuerra EMelegati JDaniel J(2023)Anti-patterns in managing uncertain Non-Functional RequirementsProceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3628034.3628067(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628034.3628067
Pícha PHönel SBrada PEricsson MLöwe WWingkvist ADaněk J(2022)Process anti-pattern detection – a case studyProceedings of the 27th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3551902.3551965(1-18)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551902.3551965
Ullmann GPolitowski CGuéhéneuc YPetrillo FMontandon J(2022)Video game project management anti-patternsProceedings of the 6th International ICSE Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering Fun, Inspiration, and Motivation10.1145/3524494.3527623(9-15)Online publication date: 20-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524494.3527623
Vranić VVranić AKhail W(2020)Growing Organizations with PatternsProceedings of the European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs 202010.1145/3424771.3424903(1-11)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3424771.3424903
Berta PVranic V(2019)Synergy of Organizational Patterns and Aspect-Oriented Programming2019 IEEE 15th International Scientific Conference on Informatics10.1109/Informatics47936.2019.9119335(000439-000444)Online publication date: Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/Informatics47936.2019.9119335

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten