Warm Bodies

This anti-pattern is also known as "heroic programmer", where the entire project's in-depth knowledge is locked into a few individuals out of many. This is often seen in large projects where it has 100~400 programmers.

Symptoms and Consequences

• When that 1-2 developers enters the team, everyone crown them as heroes or master of that technology.
• When the project has more than 100 programmers.

Causes

• Project management problem related to human resources.
• No risk management.
• Office politics influences (key developers felt safer from retrenchment periods).

Refactor Recipe

• Manage the project in a way that has an average of 4 programmers; 4 months period time.
• Project that has more than 5 programmers usually introduces communications issues.
• To mitigate heroic programmers knowledge debt, assign 1-2 programmers to deep learn the technologies as deep as them while they are still around.
• Document the knowledge.