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Without any concrete evidence or cases, the general description of a problem in this article is not very convincing. Software maintenance itself is not an anti-pattern. Instead, what is described is a situation of product/project mismanagement. > ... software is not considered complete when it's first released.
I don't know where this assumption comes from. > Governments often use two anti-patterns... (2) moving to reduce
sustaining staff too early;
This seems like a complete description of the problem, which doesn't sound like a pattern but an issue of conflating deadlines, releases, and project completion. > To keep teams from constantly plugging leaks while missing
the reason the boat is sinking, we need to apply the
principles of agile development and user centered design
Honestly, this sounds like the waterfall model is preferred to agile development in this case. Agile development can more easily lead a team into constantly plugging leaks than other, more traditional development models.But I think this article is really addressing public facing web platforms instead of all "software," which the US government has only really experimented with during the last administration, so some of the sentiments of this article, in the context of government, may be true even though it reads false. Beginning with the analogy to building construction: A skyscraper isn't complete when just the floors and frame are put in place, and the building team doesn't let the builders go at that point. When it is opened up, the maintenance staff have their own job, but it's nothing like what renovators might have to do years later. |
I don't know where this assumption comes from.
My anecdata, doing IT support for about 1,000 small-business sites: it's customary to only adopt new Microsoft releases after SP1 has been released. Our customers sometimes even explicitly instruct us so.