It is an antipattern. But IMO still better than "feature freezing" for months, delivering nothing of (business) value for weeks or months, working like madmen t

It is an antipattern. But IMO still better than "feature freezing" for months, delivering nothing of (business) value for weeks or months, working like madmen trying to remove the last 10% of the old code - which by the 90/10 rule, costs probably 90% of the budget. I'd rather have three or four versions - provided these are marked well, documented, and so on. Even if the codebase uses four versions, at any point in time, there is still only one thats the right one today.