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Architecture
Anti-Pattern Catalog

16 enterprise architecture anti-patterns across four domains. Each pattern includes symptoms to watch for, root causes, severity rating, and concrete remediation steps.

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3-page printable reference. All 16 anti-patterns with symptoms, severity, and remediation — landscape A4.

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Architecture Anti-Pattern Catalog overview showing 16 patterns across Governance, Integration, Data, and Infrastructure domains
16 anti-patterns organized by domain, with detection methods and remediation framework
Anti-pattern severity vs detection difficulty scatter plot
Severity × Detection Difficulty — patterns in the top-right quadrant are the most dangerous
Integration spaghetti anti-pattern vs clean mediated integration
Anti-Pattern #5 visualized: point-to-point spaghetti vs. mediated integration platform

All 16 Anti-Patterns

Governance

#1Architecture by Committee

High

Symptoms: Decision paralysis, 6+ month review cycles, watered-down standards that offend nobody and help nobody.

✓ Remediation: Define clear RACI. Empower domain architects to decide within guardrails. Reserve committee for strategic-level decisions only.

#2Ivory Tower Architect

Critical

Symptoms: Models nobody reads, target states nobody can reach, growing irrelevance of the EA function.

✓ Remediation: Embed architects in delivery teams. Co-create models with implementers. Validate every artifact with implementation feedback.

#3Shelfware Blueprint

Medium

Symptoms: Beautiful 200-page document, zero implementation progress, next full rewrite scheduled in 2 years.

✓ Remediation: Publish incrementally. Link every architecture decision to a funded initiative. Kill documents that have no implementation owner.

#4Governance Theater

High

Symptoms: Every proposal approved without challenge, no exceptions ever recorded, compliance is a checkbox exercise.

✓ Remediation: Publish ARB rejection rates. Record Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). Conduct reviews with genuine authority to reject.

Integration

#5Integration Spaghetti

Critical

Symptoms: Any change breaks 5 systems. Nobody knows all the interfaces. End-to-end testing is impossible.

✓ Remediation: Introduce an integration platform. Enforce canonical data models. API-first design with versioning.

#6Golden Hammer ESB

Medium

Symptoms: ESB is the bottleneck. Simple REST call routed through 7 ESB transformations and 3 queues.

✓ Remediation: Right-size integration patterns: direct API for simple calls, event bus for pub/sub, ESB only for complex orchestration.

#7Vendor Lock-in Trap

High

Symptoms: Switching vendors requires full rewrite. Vendor controls your roadmap and pricing unilaterally.

✓ Remediation: Anti-corruption layers at every vendor boundary. Standard interfaces (OpenAPI, AsyncAPI). Evaluate exit cost before every contract.

#8Synchronous Quicksand

Critical

Symptoms: Cascading timeouts. 99.9% availability per service means 99% at 10 hops. Peak load causes avalanche failure.

✓ Remediation: Default to async/event-driven. Circuit breakers and bulkheads for sync calls. Synchronous only where latency truly requires it.

Data & Modeling

#9God Object / God Service

High

Symptoms: One service owns 40 database tables. Every change is high-risk. Cannot scale or deploy independently.

✓ Remediation: Decompose along bounded contexts. Apply the single responsibility principle. Use domain-driven design to find natural boundaries.

#10Data Lake Swamp

Critical

Symptoms: Nobody trusts the data. Analysts spend 80% of their time cleaning. No lineage, no catalog, no ownership.

✓ Remediation: Implement data zones (raw → curated → published). Assign data stewards per domain. Enforce metadata and quality standards.

#11Copy-Paste Architecture

Medium

Symptoms: Price calculation exists in 4 systems, each slightly different. A bug fix must be applied 4 times.

✓ Remediation: Identify canonical business services. Centralize shared logic into reusable services or libraries with clear ownership.

#12Phantom Requirements

Medium

Symptoms: Over-engineered abstractions. 10x complexity built for hypothetical future needs that never materialize.

✓ Remediation: Apply YAGNI. Build for known, validated requirements. Refactor when genuine new needs actually emerge.

Infrastructure

#13Lift-and-Shift Cloud

Critical

Symptoms: Cloud costs exceed on-premises. No elasticity, no managed services, no cloud-native benefits achieved.

✓ Remediation: Cloud-native roadmap. Prioritize workloads for re-platform vs re-architect vs retain. Measure cloud ROI per workload.

#14Microservice Mania

High

Symptoms: Distributed monolith. 500 services maintained by 3 developers. Debugging requires tracing across 12 services.

✓ Remediation: Start with a well-structured modular monolith. Extract services only when team size and scale genuinely justify the overhead.

#15Security as Afterthought

Critical

Symptoms: Critical vulnerabilities discovered in the final sprint. Expensive emergency rework or reluctantly accepted risk.

✓ Remediation: Shift-left security: threat modeling during design, DevSecOps pipeline, security architecture review at project inception.

#16Resume-Driven Design

High

Symptoms: Kubernetes cluster for a 3-page website. Kafka for 10 events per hour. Team cannot maintain the stack.

✓ Remediation: Technology radar (adopt/trial/assess/hold). Match technology to actual scale, team skill, and operational capacity.

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