3 ms·
In all fairness to CGI and company, the government set them up for abject failure, no dream team of programmers could have succeeded with it taking the role of
by hga 10y ago
In all fairness to CGI and company, the government set them up for abject failure, no dream team of programmers could have succeeded with it taking the role of integrator for which is did not have the talent or realization of the testing required, so many delayed decisions, and last minute changes (like a very big one a week or two before), being forced to use an unfamiliar database that, worse, implemented an unfamiliar paradigm (wasn't an RDBMS), etc.
I wrote more details on this on HN at the time, ask and I'll dig some up.
- jomamaxx 10y agoI don't doubt that, but it's $2 Billion we're talking. An 'unfamiliar database' does not begin to cover it. Neither do 'last minute changes'. It was a boondogle from the start, failure in gov, failure in planning etc., failure to understand what they are doing. Google Engineers had to come in and fix it.
- hga 10y agoI'm sorry for my lack of clarity: An unfamiliar database paradigm. If it was some random RDBMS there wouldn't have been a huge problem there. You ignored the constantly late transmission of requirements, and I can't believe you're saying that a fundamental re-engineering of the way the site worked 2 or less weeks before launch should be trivialized. How are you even going to test that, when you don't really have the time to implement it well?