[steve86]

Maybe they did test it, and they went live with it anyway?

I think you are right. They performed load simulations but the actual load came in at roughly 3X the design specs. But I've read developers saying that a bigger problem was the endless deluge of change orders -- where the resulting code was not tested adequately, if at all, resulting in problems like the pull-down glitch. The entire project was a continually changing morass rather than a disciplined software development project with strictly defined freeze points and a production version code change cut-off.

[Political Junkie Too]

Some people (and Obama certainly fits the bill) think that it's better to get it out there and suffer the post-go-live consequences, than to miss the go-live in the first place. Forward recovery always seems to be better than the stigma of failing to deliver at all.

-PJ

[livius]

I guess that’s what happens when you design a software based on an ideology rather than specs...

[Donnafrflorida]

aka scope creep.