Author Description

"Emphasizing leadership principles and practices, Antipatterns: Managing Software Organizations and People, Second Edition catalogs 49 business practices that are often precursors to failure. This updated edition of a bestseller not only illustrates bad management approaches, but also covers the bad work environments and cultural traits commonly found in IT, software development, and other business domains. For each antipattern, it describes the situation and symptoms, gives examples, and offers a refactoring solution. The authors, graduate faculty at Penn State University, avoid an overly scholarly style and infuse the text with entertaining sidebars, cartoons, stories, and jokes. They provide names for the antipatterns that are visual, humorous, and memorable. Using real-world anecdotes, they illustrate key concepts in an engaging manner. This updated edition sheds light on new management and environmental antipattems and includes a new chapter, six updated chapters, and new discussion questions. Topics covered include leadership principles, environmental antipatterns, group patterns, management antipatterns, and team leadership.Following introductory material on management theory and human behavior, the text catalogs the full range of management, cultural, and environmental antipatterns. It includes thought-provoking exercises that each describe a situation, ask which antipatterns are present, and explain how to refactor the situation. It provides time-tested advice to help you overcome bad practices through successful interaction with your clients, customers, peers, supervisors, and subordinates. "-- "Preface In troubled organizations, a frequent obstacle to success is accurate problem identification. When problems are incorrectly diagnosed by management or by the consultants they hire, then correction of the problem is rarely possible. Conversely, when problems are correctly identified, they can almost always be dealt with appropriately. Unfortunately, organizational inertia frequently clouds the situation or makes it easier to do the wrong thing rather than the right thing. So how can one know what the right thing is if one has the problem wrong? This is where antipatterns can be helpful. Shortly after the emergence of patterns*, practitioners began discussing problem- solution pairs in which the conventional solution does more harm than good, known as "antipatterns." In their groundbreaking work, AntiPatterns, Brown, Malveaux, McCormick, and Mowbray (1998) described a taxonomy of problems that can occur in software engineering. They also described solutions or refactorings for these situations. The benefit of providing such a taxonomy is that it assists in the rapid and correct identification of problem situations, provides a playbook for addressing the problems, and provides some relief to the participants who can take consolation in the fact that they are not alone. Brown et al. organized their antipatterns into three general types: (1) architectural, (2) design, and (3) management. The architectural patterns describe bad practices that lead to unacceptable software architectures (for example, "Kitchen Sink"). The design antipatterns do the same for design (everyone knows about "Design by Committee"). The management antipatterns generally describe dysfunctional behavior of individual managers, or pervasive management practices that inhibit success"--