Software Maintenance by Skeleton Crew Is an Anti-Pattern

This title is misleading, should be closer to "Government frequently adopts anti-patterns when maintaining software" Something more constrained to what the article is actually about rather that the global catch all "software maintenance".

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 agree that the title is misleading, but I'd clarify it to "Software development as typically practiced in industry is an anti-pattern." (Maybe it also applies to government; I don't know.) It seems fairly typical in my experience for the old thing to be continually patched over instead of fixed, awaiting replacement by the new thing that is never quite ready.

If users have put up with bugs for this long, why should the system be improved?

Either fix the bugs quickly, or don't fix them at all, and move on.

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