Will ObamaCare ‘tech surge’ throw good money after bad?

Fox News ^ | 10/25/2013 | Kelley Vlahos

[SeekAndFind]

President Obama's "tech surge" to turn around the failing HealthCare.gov is running into concerns that the administration could be throwing "good money after bad" while complicating an already complicated situation.

Tech experts who spoke with FoxNews.com say that, like any good military strategy, this "surge" is not just about the number of soldiers, but how they're used. The administration's plan to enlist a team of experts and specialists from both the private and public sector could be a big waste of money if they aren't used correctly.

[Turbo Pig]

Yes

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The problem from the beginning was too many cooks and design-by-affirmative-action-committee.

Throwing more bodies at it will only make it worse.

[Third Person]

Just another money laundering scheme.

[SeekAndFind]

DID KATHERINE SEBELIUS BOTHER TO READ THIS BOOK ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING??

Quotes from The Mythical Man-Month

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Some books are like an annuity, for both reader and author: they keep paying dividends, year after year. That certainly is the case with The Mythical Man-Month,. -- Ed Yourdon.

Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you. Menu of Restaurant Antoine, New Orleans. [page 13]

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. Why is this cause of disaster so common?

First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite untrue, i.e., that all will go well.

Second, our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable.

Third, because we are uncertain of our estimates, software managers often lack the courteous stubbornness of Antoine's chef.

Fourth, schedule progress is poorly monitored. Techniques proven and routine in other engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations in software engineering.

Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster. [page 14]

In many creative activities the medium of execution is intractable. Lumber splits; paints smear; electrical circuits ring. These physical limitations of the medium constrain the ideas that may be expressed, and they also create unexpected difficulties in the implementation. [page 15]

Computer programming, however, creates with an exceedingly tractable medium. The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium is tractable, we expect few difficulties in implementation; hence our pervasive optimism. Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs; hence our optimism is unjustified. [page 15]

The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit of effort used in estimating and scheduling: the man-month. Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging. [page 17; emphasis in original]

In examining conventionally scheduled projects, I have found that few allowed one-half of the projected schedule for testing, but that most did indeed spend half of the actual schedule for that purpose. Many of these were on schedule until and except in system testing. [page 20]

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices--wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save--burned in one part, raw in another. [page 21]

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

This then is the demythologizing of the man-month. The number of months of a project depends upon its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends upon the number of independent subtasks. From these two quantities one can derive schedules using fewer men and more months. (The only risk is product obsolescence.) One cannot, however, get workable schedules using more men and fewer months. More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. [pages 25-26; emphasis in original]

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back.

Why aren't defects fixed more cleanly? First, even a subtle defect shows itself as a local failure of some kind. In fact it often has system-wide ramifications, usually nonobvious. Any attempt to fix it with minimum effort will repair the local and obvious, but unless the structure is pure or the documentation very fine, the far-reaching effects of the repair will be overlooked. Second, the repairer is usually not the man who wrote the code, and often he is a junior programmer or trainee. [page 122]

How does a project get to be a year late?... One day at a time. [page 153]

But the day-by-day slippage is harder to recognize, harder to prevent, harder to make up. Yesterday a key man was sick, and a meeting couldn't be held. Today the machines are all down, because lightning struck the building's power transformer. Tomorrow the disk routines won't start testing, because the first disk is a week late from the factory. Snow, jury duty, family problems, emergency meetings with customer, executive audits--the list goes on and on. Each one only postpones some activity by a half-day or a day. And the schedule slips, one day at a time. [page 154]

For picking the milestones there is only one relevant rule. Milestones must be concrete, specific, measurable events, defined with knife-edge sharpness. Coding, for a counterexample, is "90 percent finished" for half of the total coding time. Debugging is "99 percent complete" most of the time. "Planning complete" is an event one can proclaim almost at will. [page 154]

© 1995 Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

---

Extracted from The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Addison Wesley Pub. Co., 1975, 25th Anniversary edition, 2000.

[Smokin' Joe]

This administration has a track record of doubling down on its stupidities. And then doubling down again. It is 99.9999% probable they will push forward with their agenda, no matter the wreckage or cost.

[JPG]

Relax...the techs are on it!

[DannyTN]

Will the sun rise in the morning?
Will we have weather?
Will a skunks spray stink?

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Is water wet?

[dfwgator]

Does Elmer Fudd have trouble with the letter “R”?

[Noumenon]

Will ObamaCare ‘tech surge’ throw good money after bad?

Is the bear Catholic?
Does the Pope...

[WayneS]

No. But it will throw bad money after bad.

[duckman]

By the time zerocare goes into the death spiral it will cost us over a trillion dollars.

[rdcbn]

Will ObamaCare ‘tech surge’ throw good money after bad?

---

Computers fundamentally take a well defined, systematic process and the automate that process. The computer model then takes data inputs from an external sources, runs them through the computer model of the process to perform the tasks in an automated fashion and then generates outputs based on the input data and presents or stores data.

If you have an unworkable process, there is no way you can build a computer program to automate that process.

ObamaCare is an expression of socialistic ideological utopian ideal, not a well though out, internally consistent workable system that is capable of being implemented practically in the real world under any circumstances and as such it is not possible to build a computer program.

You can't automate a system that can't function i the first place.

The fact that are such massive bugs and design/implementation problems with the web site only obscures the reality that the system can't work under any circumstances and delays the realization that that is the case.

[dfwgator]

There’s a technical term we use, “GIGO”.

[Red Badger]

Here’s what will happen:

While the ‘Tech Surge’ sounds good to the ‘No Info Voters’, it will be complicated by the bureaucracy establishing rules to prevent the ‘surge’ from actually working.:

Are they minorities? No? Then you must hire more minorities, regardless of expertise.

Are they women? No? Then you must hire more women, regardless of expertise.

Are they gay? No? Then you must hire more gays, lesbians, transvestites and bisexuals, regardless of expertise.

Are they poor urban inner city disaffected workers? No? Then you must hire more poor urban inner city disaffected people, regardless of expertise.

And on and on and on, until the wheel comes to a complete stop....................

[rdcbn]

There’s a technical term we use, “GIGO”.

---

With ObamaCare, the big problem is the garbage in between.

The ObamaCare architects have created a new paradigm in the annals programming axioms - “garbage in , garbage out and garbage in between”

[tanknetter]

Here’s the big one: have the people brought in as part of the tech surge been properly vetted and cleared to interact with personally identifiable information (PII) and Public Health Information (PHI)?

That process takes MONTHS. Republicans should be demanding to know whether normal getting and clearance processes are being circumvented in the attempt to save this thing.

[MasterGunner01]

ObamaCare is like wine and sewerage:

1. Put a teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewerage and you get sewerage.
2, Put a teaspoon of sewerage in a barrel of wine and you get sewerage.

[norwaypinesavage]

Obama “tech surge”: It’s October 1 and you need a tax deduction by January 1, in 3 months. So you impregnate three women.