CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2011/ch7 7d df

DesignPatters

Introduction

In Software Engineering, Anti-Patters are a class of patterns that may appear to improve code at first but end up hindering it in the long run. While a pattern can be looked at as a solution to a problem, and anti-pattern is considered a bad solution to a problem. The name anti-patern was coined by Andrew Koenig in response to the book, Design Patterns, by Gang of Four but was not commonplace until the book, AntiPatterns. In the book, the authors had written about many bad design decisions they had seen used over and over in the workplace. An anti-pattern is not to be confused with bad programming habits. There are two main distinctions between an anti-pattern and bad programming. First, for a bad idea to be an anti-pattern, it has to have some sort of structure and is reusable and second, the anti-pattern has to have a well documented, correct solution. Listed below are some of the most common anti-patterns.