Two weeks ago, my friend Yusef Mehrdad asked me about a good reference on architectural anti-patterns and here is my answer :

  • I haven't seen any centeralized source for Architecture Anti-Patterns.
  • Based on te architectural style  that you choose for your project, you can find some bad practices (anti-patterns). For example the following link is about using Replication as an anti-pattern in Service Oriented Architecture:

                    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb245678.aspx

  • About 5 years age, When I was preparing my course about software architecture, I found the following post as a good start point :

                    http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=27414 

  • If you googling the web, you can find some interesting materials about the Architectural Anti-Patterns, but most of these contents are mixed up with Design Anti-Patterns, lessons learned and so on. For example "Reinvent the Wheel" is one of the anti-patterns mentioned in the following source. But I think it is just opposite of one of the popular best practice ("Do not Reinvent the Wheel") that can be applied to programming, design and architecture and it is not  a specific architectural anti-pattern:                                                

                    http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/software-architecture-antipatterns

                    and also this :

                     http://www.antipatterns.com/arch_cat.htm

  • If you are interested in anti-patterns in software development in general, the following source is good one:
AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis