"No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" (NSB) is a paper on software engineering written by Fred Brooks in 1986. Brooks argues that "there is no single development, in either technology or management …

In software engineering, tester-driven development, or bug-driven development, is an anti-pattern where the requirements are determined by bug reports or test results rather than, for example, the value or cost of a feature.

Reinventing the square wheel is the practice of unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a …

Programming by permutation, sometimes called "programming by accident" or "shotgunning", is an approach to software development wherein a programming problem is solved by iteratively making small changes (permutations) and testing each change to see …

Typically, optimization involves choosing the best overall algorithms and data structures. Frequently, algorithmic improvements can cause performance improvements of several orders of magnitude instead of micro-optimizations, which rarely improve performance by more than a …

Internal ideas are dismissed because they originated within the organisation, rather than assessed on their merits. The term is typically used in a pejorative sense. The opposite predisposition is sometimes called "invented here", "not …

Not invented here (NIH) is the tendency to avoid using or buying products, research, standards, or knowledge from external origins. It is usually adopted by social, corporate, or institutional cultures.

A known failure is left unaddressed because its occurrence is considered unlikely.

The law of the instrument, law of the hammer, Maslow's hammer, or golden hammer is a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool.

Spaghetti code is computer source code with convoluted control flow, with statements directing program execution without structure, instead resembling cooked spaghetti, twisted and tangled.