Posted on 10/20/2013 2:10:29 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday it was bringing in outside help to resolve some of the technical woes that have beset the federally run insurance exchanges, which the agency acknowledged “has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.”
“We are committed to doing better,” agency officials said in a blog post that also said that “our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.”
Spokespeople for the agency didn’t immediately respond to questions seeking more information about the development, which it is billing as a “tech surge.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
The term "Flat Line" will soon be used.
Regarding throwing more resources at a software problem:
“You can’t get nine women pregnant and have a baby in a month.”
Don't mean I sure wouldn't want to give it a shot. ;)
———all without accountability——
either you make it work or you die........ that’s the deal
it’s called the law of diminishing returns
for every person added after the overload point, there are diminishing returns on the labor investment.
I gotta remember that one. Brilliant.
In some cases, I might agree with you.
Not in this one.
There are NINTY seperate applications this thing must talk to. On the Registration page ALONE, there are ELEVEN CSS sheets (not one -- ELEVEN) and 57 javascript *libraries* -- not the standard JQuery ones, I mean custom-writes -- much less actual call-outs.
Start fresh and you have a small shot. Keep THAT code and yer dead.
(I hope they keep the code) lol
I could start with MySql, Apache Wicket with Twitter Bootstrap and crank out that site in two weeks, bug free.
I've been on Enterprise teams, and right now I'm on a quasi-enterprise deal. It's a single guy doing it -- me -- but I must serve as BA, DBA, PM, coder, tester, documenter -- and I'm pulling it all off only by the dint of my experience.
When I heard the particulars of this enterprise, I gulped and felt sorry for the Obamacare team. As much as I hated the concept, I felt sorry for the poor fools that got sucked into it.
Actually, I also doubt that anyone could crank out this size of a site -- with this sort of user load, and with the number of systems you would need to integrate to -- even with a solid team of A+++++ players -- in anything less than 4 years.
Even Facebook evolved over a half-dozen years. Amazon, a dozen.
I am curious about the number of lines of code. There must be a ton. Anyone new to the project will take some time to get up to speed. With so little testing, the original programmers don’t even know if they captured the required functionality in the original code.
Best thing would be to pull the web site and after the ‘new’ experts get a handle on things issue a new schedule of releases that result in the full desired functionality being delivered.
I predict that will not occur during Odumbo’s second term.
Well to clarity, I wouldn’t build the whole thing at once, just put out the parts you need to get started, then add in the rest over time.
They didn’t need the entire system to be 100 % complete to get it up and going, they could phase different pieces in over time.
Waterfall-component approach. Only viable if a solid plan for ALL the components are in play. You could Agile each component for best speed, but the design itself would need to take about 9 months for a good solid peer-reviewed “Give it your best shot, shoot down my idea” brainstorm design series of sessions.
You’d also still have the issue of integration to over 90 seperate applications. If you could leverage the agencies owning the apps to deliver a certain interface, that could help your schedule.
‘site’s problems extend beyond well-publicized front-end obstacles’
Nice way of saying that the backend sucks as well.
It MIGHT be feasible by the end of Obama's fourth term.
MIGHT.
6 months to a year? HA HA. Too late. Not possible. You’d have to start from scratch to get it really fixed.
That’s going to cost them. Uh, I meant us.
I think I’m going to go with post 97. :-)
The basic functioning of this web site should be so simple, that any decent programmers should be able to make it from scratch in 6 months to a year. But part of the problem seems to be that Sebelius and the HHS were extremely slow in getting the specific requirements to the programmers. The other problem is to what extent this web site has to interface with pre-existing government databases like the IRS. That part could be an enormous hassle for the programmers and might not be possible to do in the “real time” way this web site was expected to perform. But stuff like selecting the security questions and password for your account...it’s inconceivable how that could be causing errors, and that indicates the original programmers didn’t know what they were doing.
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