Dependence Anti Patterns

A dependence anti pattern is a dependence structure that may indicate potential problems for on-going software maintenance and evolution. Dependence anti patterns are not structures that must always be avoided. Rather, they denote warnings that should be investigated. This paper defines a set of dependence anti patterns and presents a series of case studies that show how these patterns can be identified using techniques for dependence analysis and visualization. The paper reports the results of this analysis on six real world programs, two of which are open source and four of which are part of production code in use with Daimler.