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 …

"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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Soft coding is a computer coding term that refers to obtaining a value or function from some external resource, such as text files, INI files, preprocessor macros, external constants, configuration files, command-line arguments, databases, …