Anyone who works with IT/software knows that you don’t expect a system to magically work without testing the stuffing out of it—with users in the loop. Apparently, the procedures for system engineering and test were ignored here big time. “Hope” might be a winning argument when it comes to politics, but it doesn’t feed the bulldog in engineering.
Either:
1. The people doing the IT oversight for the campaign were totally incompetent.
2. The $$ just wasn’t there to do things right (a distinct possibility).
3. The folks writing the software were closet Obama supporters and that impacted their work. [Wouldn’t totally rule this out.]
4. All of the above.
I saw the job posting for Lead QA Engineer and almost applied. If the democrats wanted to sabotage the campaign from the inside this was the position to do it.
It was vapor ware.
In the early 90’s my business partner produced an app that eventually became robo calling, recorded messaging from businesses and anything that calls you today.
He was always a day away from taking it live. I told him writing this in fortran will never fly. There was better code use and I brought in an expert to write the system. I explained about integration testing, user testing and the proper processes for how to take an app to market. He wouldn’t listen. He diluted my stock and basically tossed me out on my butt.
I was an experienced IT programmer and systems engineer. He took a course in fortran in college 10 years earlier. Wouldn’t let me or the programmer go near the code.
Point is, Romney was sold a bill of goods and all he knew was there was an app that would change the election in his favor. He probably asked one question, “will this work?” And probably got back, “of course it will work.”
In fairness to the Romney campaign (and speaking as a software developer), I’m sure they ran a very large number of tests on the Orca system. But it’s difficult to simulate the number of simultaneous users that you have on election day and there’s no possible way to simulate all the possible technical and user-related problems that can occur on election day. My take on this is that the GOP needs to use a simpler and less-sophisticated system next time that doesn’t rely so much on real-time data from field operatives with smart phones, but just gets the basic job done and enables volunteers to contact all the likely GOP voters.