So, How are those website fixes coming, guys?

I don't envy the army of geeks who are engaged in trying to salvage something from the healthcare.gov debacle. They've been at it for six weeks with still no clear prospects of when the site might be usuable - even barely.

Jeff Zients, the Obama administration's point man riding herd on the army of techies who are frantically working to repair the glitches that are constantly showing up, says they've established some priorities; a top 50 list of the most important fixes for the website. Of course, that doesn't include more dozens of minor issues that need to be addressed.

Jeff Zients, the Obama administration's point man in the repair mission, joined the daily update for reporters Friday and said there is a top priority punch list - with "50 priority fixes as we enter this week."

And that doesn't count the lower priority fixes in what Zients called an "iterative process."

In the conference call he said the system is getting better - but it's not where it needs to be.

"We clearly need the system to perform reliably with fast response times at higher volumes," he said.

The administration is aiming to get the site working smoothly for the "vast majority" of users by the end of this month - but they've also noted that "smoothly" doesn't mean perfect. Zients said he expects "intermittent periods of suboptimal performance."

Not quite sure what he means by an "iterative process." He may be referring to some elements of the of the website that have repeat failures for certain functions that would need to be addressed. It sounds as if fixing the minor stuff will be a long, laborious process - a matter of finding and fixing a lot of code.

“iterative process.”

In this case he does not mean the normal iterative process that some posters have explained.

He means an iterative process of diagnostics / debugging; by which, he means the next bug surfaces when a previous bug has been fixed. The first bug prevented getting far enough into the process for the subsequent hidden bugs to present themselves.

Your car won’t start. Using diagnostics 101, nothing is cranking and you realize you have a dead battery. Until the battery is replaced, you don’t know you have a bad starter too. OK now you hear that the battery and starter are operating, but the car still won’t start. Next step . . . is it getting fuel? You discover the tank is empty, you fill the tank. Still no fuel. Fuel pump, etc. etc.

THIS is what they are doing iteratively. Each “fix” exposes the next level of hidden problems.

PLUS changing code on the fly, they have to be introducing MORE bugs with the fixes. Has to happen with a mis-managed system like this. Using the automobile analogy, “maintenance-induced failure”.

FIFTY TOP issues?? This thing is a rolling train wreck! The faster they fix it, the more bugs they will find and the more bugs they will create. It will be a hundred next time, unless they shove all those into the minor problems category.

GIVES A WHOLE NEW MEANING TO BLACK FRIDAY! which is the 29th.

How many people realize out there (I know just about everybody on FR does) what happens when you find bugs in software? It leads you to more than one new bug each, until you’ve gone from top to bottom several times. There’s mention of this being a multiple iterative process, and that’s the truth. This is extremely complex, and with so many independent parts in motion it’s going to take years of intensive work, costing billions.

Gawd, it would have been cheaper to have gotten it right in the first place rather than just shipping the work out to Obastard’s cronies.

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