Software development is hard and poorly implemented or broken tools, techniques, and patterns just make it worse. Learn to spot software development anti-patterns and how to work your way back to a sane way of working. Antipatterns can be hard to recognize and mitigate because they are solutions to problems. They can appear to solve the problem in the short run. The problem is that they create long-term consequences that are worse than the short-term problems you avoid by using them. Continuous Build is an antipattern that I have often seen where a team will have a Continuous Integration (CI) in place but it only builds the code. No code integration tests are run and health metrics are collected. While this is better than not building automatically, it leaves a lot of health check information out. Without this information, you never gain the confidence that your build is healthy. The whole point of CI is the confidence that your build is healthy. You aren’t doing CI if you can’t get that confidence with test automation and code quality analysis. Just like CI, other software development practices can be hard to understand, implement, and get right. Even with the best of intentions, we make mistakes or misinterpret the implementation of a technique. Learn how to spot common software development anti-patterns and how to correct them. These patterns include 1. Continuous Build - CI without tests isn’t CI 2. Turning quality gates off to get past a hurdle 3. Different build & deployment processes for different environments 4. Not testing in a production-like environment before production 5. Not doing performance & security testing until the end 6. Never asking the users for feedback 7. Only automating build and deployment, not testing 8. Not having retrospectives 9. Overuse the latest development trend 10. Expecting change without changing the incentive system We have all experienced a time when we wanted to believe we could make an antipattern work but it never does. It is better to learn how to spot these and how to correct them than it is to try to keep tweaking a broken process hoping this time it will be better.