John Wetherill, ActiveState's Developer Evangelist

Building reliable and successful enterprise software is hard. Given the breadth and depth of required expertise, the vast complexity and changing requirements of the design, the relentless evolution of technology, and the overwhelming variety of frameworks, languages, and tools available, it's a wonder anything gets built at all.

To help combat some of these hurdles, many industry "best practices"

have evolved. Software development efforts that pay attention to these practices stand a much greater chance of success. 

But an astonishing number of development teams and organizations ignore these best practices, operating blindly and following behavior that tends toward failure. With enough repetition, patterns emerge:

these are are known as "antipatterns" -- behaviors which are known to be ineffective and/or counterproductive. In other words, behaviors that risk failure. 

The good news is that many of these antipatterns are easily avoidable. And it turns out that Platform as a Solution (PaaS) is an ideal foundation from which to do so. 

This talk identifies several costly yet surprisingly common antipatterns practiced regularly by corporations of all sizes and across all industries.

It then describes specific ways that PaaS, with great agility, reduces and often eliminates the underlying causes of each practice, in most cases with little explicit action required by the developer.

If you identify with any of the antipatterns outlined here you'll leave this talk with a strong compulsion to incorporate PaaS into your development efforts.