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Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle

• GVIrish 13y ago
  That article misses the point by a country mile. Whether a software project is open source or not, poor project management will cause failure every time. Healthcare.gov had several significant challenges to deal with, from a hard deadline, to the ACA being in flux, to the general difficulty of trying to develop software for a government customer that may not understand software development very well. Healthcare.gov should have been rolled out in phases to smaller groups of users but that may have been politically impossible. There also should've been an open bidding process for the contract, but that didn't happen because of the timeline (although admittedly the bidding process could have resulted in a worse contractor being selected). I just wonder if this is going to be the first time that a major failure in a government IT contract is going to have real political fallout for elected officials.