Designed by Committee

The anti-pattern is an architecture created by a large group of diversified people from management, marketing, finance, etc. but not technical folks like architect.

Symptoms and Consequences

• Often, the design outcome is ridiculously rich with features infeasible for development.
• Unreasonable time frame.
• The design is so complex that it is unreadable, incoherent, or is excessively defective.
• Documentation is voluminous (hundreds or thousands of pages).
• Convergence and stability are missing from requirements and design.
• Architect and developer has conflicting interpretation of the design.
• Design becomes significantly over-budget and over-due.
• Necessary to hire specialist just to interpret the design.

Causes

• No designed project architect.
• ineffective software process.
• Bad meeting processes like lack of facilitation.
• Gold platting.
• Attempt to make everybody happy.
• Design and editing is attempted during meeting with more than 5 people.
• Explicit priorities and a software-value system are undermined.
• Concerns are not separated or not used.

Refactor Recipe

• Reform the architecture by including a project architect.
• Facilitate the meeting in a way that:
  • Why are we here?
  • What is the problem?
  • What outcomes do we want?
• Factor in all the missing part (e.g. need more time) and clears up all the ridicules.