Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.

Each newly discovered special case receives another local fix, while the underlying model remains unchanged.

A design pattern is the re-usable form of a solution to a design problem. The idea was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander and has been adapted for various other disciplines, particularly software engineering.

In computer programming, error hiding (or error swallowing) is the practice of catching an error or exception, and then continuing without logging, processing, or reporting the error to other parts of the software.

In computer science and software engineering, busy-waiting, busy-looping or spinning is a technique in which a process repeatedly checks to see if a condition is true, such as whether keyboard input or a lock …

In computer programming, negative cache is a cache that also stores "negative" responses, i.e. failures. This means that a program remembers the result indicating a failure even after the cause has been corrected.

In amateur radio and computing, a boat anchor or boatanchor is something obsolete, useless, and cumbersome – so-called because metaphorically its only productive use is to be thrown into the water as a boat …

A program trusts a result or change without checking the assumptions on which its correctness depends.

"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 …

Action at a distance is an anti-pattern in computer science in which behavior in one part of a program varies wildly based on difficult or impossible to identify operations in another part of the …