Too Scary To Replace

I've seen this, but it was the management who were scared. They had lived and worked with a system framework for many years (in fact, no-one seemed to know exactly how old it was - different people gave ages between 8 and 15 years), but framework was simply not up to the task of the current products and most engineers saw it as a BoatAnchor. The management, however, had come to see it as the only way to build anything and replacing it was far too scary to consider. So everyone was left spending orders of magnitude more time than necessary to crank out simple features while the team responsible for the framework (which I was part of) slowly crufted better bits around it to help in the limited way they were allowed. I now work for a different division. -- NeilGall

CategoryAntiPattern