Team Workflow
Anti-patterns in how teams assign, coordinate, and manage the flow of work.
Quality and Delivery Anti-Patterns
Start here. Find the anti-patterns your team is facing and learn the path to solving them.
2 minute read
Every team migrating to continuous delivery faces obstacles. Most are not unique to your team, your technology, or your industry. This section catalogs the anti-patterns that hurt quality, increase rework, and make delivery timelines unpredictable - then provides a concrete path to fix each one.
Start with the problem you feel most. Each page links to the practices and migration phases that address it.
Anti-pattern index
Sorted by quality impact so you can prioritize what to fix first.
| Anti-pattern | Category | Quality impact |
|---|---|---|
| Long-Lived Feature Branches | Branching & Integration | Quality Impact: Critical |
| No Continuous Integration | Branching & Integration | Quality Impact: Critical |
| No Test Automation | Testing & Quality | Quality Impact: Critical |
| Manual Regression Testing Gates | Testing & Quality | Quality Impact: Critical |
| No Pipeline Exists | Pipeline & Infrastructure | Quality Impact: Critical |
| Pull Request Review Bottlenecks | Team Workflow | Quality Impact: High |
| Work Items Too Large | Team Workflow | Quality Impact: High |
| Too Much Work in Progress | Team Workflow | Quality Impact: High |
| Push-Based Work Assignment | Team Workflow | Quality Impact: High |
| Flaky Test Suites | Testing & Quality | Quality Impact: High |
| Inverted Test Pyramid | Testing & Quality | Quality Impact: High |
| Manual Deployments | Pipeline & Infrastructure | Quality Impact: High |
| Snowflake Environments | Pipeline & Infrastructure | Quality Impact: High |
| Change Advisory Board Gates | Organizational & Cultural | Quality Impact: High |
| Pressure to Skip Testing | Organizational & Cultural | Quality Impact: High |
| No Observability | Monitoring & Observability | Quality Impact: High |
| Tightly Coupled Monolith | Architecture | Quality Impact: High |
| No Vertical Slicing | Team Workflow | Quality Impact: Medium |
Branching and Integration
Anti-patterns in how teams branch, merge, and integrate code that prevent continuous integration and delivery.
Testing
Anti-patterns in test strategy, test architecture, and quality practices that block continuous delivery.
Pipeline and Infrastructure
Anti-patterns in build pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure management that block continuous delivery.
Organizational and Cultural
Anti-patterns in team culture, management practices, and organizational structure that block continuous delivery.
Monitoring and Observability
Anti-patterns in monitoring, alerting, and observability that block continuous delivery.
Architecture
Anti-patterns in system architecture and design that block continuous delivery.