Posted on 10/23/2013 4:57:27 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Obamacare contractors: Don’t blame us By: Jennifer Haberkorn and Jason Millman and Brett Norman October 23, 2013 05:19 PM EDT
The Obamacare website contractors plan to tell Congress on Thursday that they are not to blame for the massive problems at HealthCare.gov and that they completed successful testing before the Oct. 1 launch.
But, according to prepared testimony, the four contractors ran into unforeseen problems once open enrollment began. The testimony offers a slight glimpse into the problems that made the website all but unworkable — and warnings that the problems are far from over.
Lawmakers are expected to press the four contractors for details on what went wrong and when they – and the White House – knew about it.
The federal exchange underwent eight technical reviews before Oct. 1 and passed, CGI Federal senior vice president Cheryl Campbell plans to tell the House Energy and Commerce Committee. CGI is considered the lead contractors on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange website.
“Unfortunately, in systems this complex with so many concurrent users, it is not unusual to discover problems that need to be addressed once the software goes into a live production environment,” she said in her written testimony. “This is true regardless of the level of formal end-to-end performance testing — no amount of testing within reasonable time limits can adequately replicate a live environment of this nature.”
Quality Software Services Inc., another major contractor that built the federal data hub and a key part of the account registration process, said that its contributions to the system are functioning well and, for the most part, have since the launch.
Coding for the data hub was finished in June, tested and the signed off on by CMS in early September...
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
I want to THANK the contractors.
I couldn’t think of a better way to destroy this Death Star.
“Don’t Blame Us”
Is that the going morale-boosting motto, inspired by the Bam?
Americans used to say: “Can-Do”.
We’ve come to: “Don’t Blame Us”?
Well, he wouldn’t know that.
They knew about it when a failed a test with a couple hundred users.
This is now a TRAP!
There are legal cases with Obamacare, which are now before at least 3 different Courts.
I am concerned that any attempt now, by Democrats, to “Delay” Obamacare will really be used to fix LEGAL problems with the existing law, and to nullify the Court Cases concerning the Federal Exchange authority to give tax credits and impose penalties.
This is a typical leftist failure: the delusion that human activity can be organized by command, that the organic structure of the markets can be improved by directives, that any set of rules one specifies will actually function has been the defining fantasy of the left since at least Lenin. Instantiating this delusion in software, even backed by massive computing power, does not magically render it realistic.
They lie! People who have looked at the client side java script found a lot of stubs marked “to do” and variables that don’t vary. Everyone is trying to disavow this nightmare.
I’m pretty sure it’s Boosh’s fault!
This software foul-up can be attributed to the Borg:
http://www.davedoyle.com/prof/pastProjects/Nerd/humor/trek.html
“Star Trek Lost Episodes” Transcript
(Picard) “Mr. LaForge, have you had any success with your attempts at finding a weakness in the Borg? And Mr. Data, have you been able to access their command pathways?”
(Geordi)”Yes, Captain. In fact, we found the answer by searching through our archives on late Twentieth-century computing technology.”
(continues)
A bit like ‘Smart Car.’
Apparently, the administration didn't want to finalize any of the decisions for this monstrosity prior to the 2012 election out of fear that the unsavory details would leak out to the public.
BINGO, what they weren't told until late in the GAME, was that there would be a pit-stop, so the regime could capture the users info, for future use..
It is a classic example of Brooks Law
ObamaCare is exhibiting classic symptoms of the Death March:
In project management, a death march is a project where the members feel it is destined to fail and/or requires a stretch of unsustainable overwork. The general feel of the project reflects that of an actual death march because the members of the project are forced to continue the project by their superiors against their better judgment.
The fields whose project management practice first named these related phenomena are software development and software engineering. Other fields have since recognized the same occurrence in their own spheres and have adopted the name.
Death marches of the destined-to-fail type usually are a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often include lack of appropriate documentation or relevant training and outside expertise that would be needed to do the task successfully. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching themselves and their coworkers being forced to torture themselves and march toward death. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours (14-hour days, 7-day weeks, etc) or by attempting to "throw (enough) bodies at the problem", often causing burnout.
Often, the discomfort is heightened by the knowledge that "it didn't have to be this way," that is, that if the company wanted to achieve the goal of the project, it could have done so in a successful way if it had been managed competently (such as by devoting the obviously required resources, including bringing all relevant expertise, technology, or applied science to the task rather than just whatever incomplete knowledge a few employees happened to know already). Patent underresourcing is especially offensive at a large corporation with sufficiently deep pockets; at least at small companies, a gap between resources and needs is understandable, but at large, profitable, cash-rich companies, underresourcing is not a necessity and thus feels to most workers like stupidity. Business culture pressures, such as the long-noted phenomenon of corporations pursuing short-term maximization of profits via cost cutting or avoidance that is damaging to long-term best interest, may play a role in addition to mere incompetence.
Among the most infamous death march projects are the Denver Airport baggage handling system and WARSIM, a U.S. Army wargame.[1][2][3] The latter project was originally called WARSIM 2000 at its inception in the early 1990s. A decade after its original scheduled delivery date, WARSIM has yet to support a single Army training exercise, but is still being funded, largely to vindicate those who conceived of the system and defended it over the lifetime of its development. The WARSIM schedule slipped many times. Moreover, WARSIM has a clumsy architecture that requires enough servers to fill a small room, while earlier "legacy" wargames run efficiently on a single standard desktop workstation.
The term "death march" in this context was discussed at length in Edward Yourdon's book Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects (ISBN 0130146595), which has a second edition simply titled Death March (ISBN 013143635X). Yourdon's definition: "Quite simply, a death march project is one whose 'project parameters' exceed the norm by at least 50 percent." [4]
See also[]
Spot on.
Well there we have it. It’s nobodies fault and Obama didn’t know about it.
Is it time for a golf game or maybe an exotic vacation??
” — no amount of testing within reasonable time limits can adequately replicate a live environment of this nature.”
This is an out-and-out lie.
However, what if they were Republican moles - you know, like the Democratic moles who sabotaged Romney’s data systems (especially around Election Day). In that case, I salute them.
LOL. We are hearing the software version of “The Operation Was A Success But The Patient Died”.
E pluribus it’s not my fault is the new American slogan. Right from the top. But fortunately we have accountability.
"QSSI built the EIDM, which was finished and tested in February and March. But Slavitt said the site, including the EIDM, was overwhelmed by the unexpected rush of traffic. He said that that may not have been as much of an issue except for a “late decision” to require people to register and account first rather than allow anonymous window shopping. He did not say who made the decision.
Who could possibly have made a stupid decision like that?
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