Posted on 10/21/2013 6:55:49 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten By Andrew Johnson October 21, 2013 9:13 AM Comments 42
Obamacare’s online exchanges have been riddled with problems since they came online three weeks ago, and those issues may continue for at least the next few weeks. Contractors said fixing the problems by the November 1 deadline set by the administration would be “unrealistic,” according to the New York Times.
From the sluggish websites to garbled enrollment information, the flaws require the extensive rewriting of code: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly,” the Times reports — that’s out of a total of approximately 500 million lines of code, according to another expert.
Others experts warned that some of the website’s problem are yet to come. One technical specialist involved in the repair effort said, “The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.”
I found two online sources saying that the average is 10-12 lines of code per programmer per day. So, call it 20 lines of code per day. That’s 250,000 days. Now divide that by the number of programmers. Except coordinating that many programmers is a huge headache. Then, you have to test the code. Then there will still be bugs. Plus, you have to get the politics out of it and just present the prices without trying to sugar coat them.
My recollection is that for military contracts we bid 10 lines per day per programmer.
>>> Y2K was a fear of programs that already were in working order.
You a programmer???
I am... and I was directly involved with updating software for Y2K. Using a 2 digit field to store what needed to be a 4 digit number by Y2K would have resulted in catastrophic logic errors that would have brought down systems indefinitely. Fixing this problem is relatively easy... but also very tedious and extensive because you have to trace the use of these date fields through all code.
The problem was real... the problem was fixed.
Businesses with actual skin in the game understood the problem, and got it fixed right on time.
Cha Ching !!
Anyone with a project management background see this ending well?
Given that they were using PHP [IIUC], not really.
PHP is pretty much actively hostile to software engineering with it's weak typing, implicit type conversions all over the place, and propensity for "what the hell, let it on through" attitude on errors. (Plus there no separation of interface and implementation, which could go a long way toward modularizing the program's subsystems.)
9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month... :)
Now, there is a counter argument. It goes like this:
"You cannot put nine women in a room and have them produce a baby in a month. But, if you stagger their pregnancies, you can get them to produce a baby a month, starting at the nine-month mark."
This counter-argument speaks to the concept of SCRUM and Agile, in which short cycle deployments are the norm.
And just think. Over half a billion dollars and three and a half years to put it together, and this is the result. Amazes me how lousy the feds can be with something, and how great they handle something else. NASA, for instance. If they handled NASA like they did that website, we would still be trying to get a satellite in orbit.
It is said that a typical development team including testers, managers can deliver 10-15K lines of code per year per member. The best teams can achieve something like 20K lines per year per member.
That would be 250 of the best for a year. It would take more than a year to hire 250 of the best, since they already have jobs...
“Lines of code” is an absolutely outdated metric. In the dot-net world, particularly in C#, I can write a single delegate wrapper that contains an Lambda expression that is so powerful it can iterate and manipulate a vast collection of objects. This one line of code might take a day to create and test.
I’d hit it with nine women, and try to get that kid ‘written’.
What are you implying, 'another expert'?
I should try to jump onto this gravy train
I can write software this bad with my eyes closed (and I think that’s what THEY did)
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THEY USED PHP????!??!??!??!??!??!
Unfixable. This thing may never work.
That said, FR runs on PHP, but it is the brainchild of one person (more manageable), much smaller scope (more manageable), and evolved over 12 years (more manageable) — and it still has some bugs.
We just got the San Fran Nan line, “we have to fix it just to find out what’s in it”
Fix 5 million lines just to find out what’s screwed up in the other 495 million.
This wasn’t unintentional.
Yes. Delayed 0 care.
But what if you reflect and your attributes are wrong and you factory object misinterprets the request and you “HIT” the wrong object? Ha ha I made a Laz funny.
Nope.
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