Just as bad smells point to design flaws in code, communication bad smells are anti-patterns: recurring signs that the way a team organizes itself, decides and shares knowledge is about to undermine the project. This catalog documents five of them, identified in a real case study, with symptoms, causes and mitigation strategies.
Remote work arrangements tend to hide communication problems that only become visible once they have already compromised deliverables and decisions. This research starts from that gap and investigates a real remote project, with teams organized by function and area, to characterize those symptoms with empirical evidence rather than intuition.
Just as bad smells in code point to deeper maintainability problems, the communication bad smells identified here point to structural failures in how teams organize themselves, share knowledge and record decisions — and they were named and cataloged from the answers of nine different teams.
Every entry in the catalog follows a fixed structure, making it quick to consult and comparable across the identified patterns.
A clear, memorable identifier for the bad smell.
What the failure pattern is and how it manifests.
The kind of environment and team in which it tends to arise.
The root of what is breaking in communication.
Observable signs reported by team members.
Concrete impact on the project when left untreated.
Practical mitigation strategies recommended.
The academic basis supporting the identified pattern.
Teams cannot synchronize schedules across overlapping personal commitments, causing project delays.
Critical knowledge isolated within a few people, creating a high risk of operational bottlenecks.
Where knowledge goes in, but is never shared or documented in an accessible way.
Critical decisions made in informal conversations, with no official or traceable record.
The slow erosion of established standards in favour of temporary shortcuts.
The catalog details the symptoms, context and mitigation strategies of each bad smell; the methodology page covers the study design, the correlation diagram and the data collected.