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I'm perpetually puzzled that people in tech keep seeing nefarious purposes behind this failure when it sounds like every failed project we've heard of. Moving t

I'm perpetually puzzled that people in tech keep seeing nefarious purposes behind this failure when it sounds like every failed project we've heard of. Moving targets (how many states, how many users), feature creep, managers with no understanding of the undertaking, too many managers, and no time for testing and debugging. It's not evil, it's just incompetent and embarrassing.

siculars 13y ago
all the states. all the citizens. how is that not obvious? these are known knowns.
- tokipin 13y ago
  i thought healthcare.gov is for those states which opted out of the medicaid expansion (i'm not sure about this). it may have been the case that the number which have opted out was unexpected by an order of magnitude. i don't know if i'd buy this excuse though
- Spooky23 13y ago
  No it's not. All states were supposed to have their own exchanges. 14 ended up doing it. New York after all sorts of political machinations agreed to run their own exchange at the 11th hour. (Supposedly "unprecedented" traffic also screwed up the NY exchange, which was also built by some big government contracting firm -- CSC)
jussij 13y ago
> It's not evil, it's just incompetent and embarrassing. And anyone who has worked in the industry over a long period of time will know that for big projects this closer to the norm than the exception. I've personally worked on one massive banking project in the 90s that turned into a billion (in today’s terms) dollar right-off and in that time I read of many other such disasters.
dersen 13y ago
Agreed. While it sounds cool to bring in a "dream team" of technical experts to save the day, it seems likely that additional non-technical issues are at play besides (or in addition to) the technical incompetence of the contractor. Here's an alternate scenario: 1. The government agency that hired the contractors does not completely understand the business requirements in a way that allows them to effectively communicate them to the contractor. This could be due to numerous factors outside their control such as changing legislation or perhaps because the ACA is so large (900+ pages) and relatively new that there are few experts who understand the minute details sufficiently to specify how the exchange should work. 2. New requirements emerge at the last minute, requiring the contractor to make significant changes. While it is recognized that additional schedule time would be needed to sufficiently implement and test the required features, there is enormous pressure (political and otherwise) to adhere to the October 1 release date, so the implementation of the features is rushed and QA is skipped. 3. There are dependencies on legacy government and commercial systems that are outside the control of the contracting agency and the contractor. The functionality of these systems impact reliability and performance, introduce strange bugs, etc. 5. The software is delivered on time but is woefully inadequate. While I wouldn't rule out the incompetence of the technical staff, these types of issues can often be traceable to problems that are more in the realm of management.

siculars 13y ago

all the states. all the citizens. how is that not obvious? these are known knowns.

tokipin 13y ago
i thought healthcare.gov is for those states which opted out of the medicaid expansion (i'm not sure about this). it may have been the case that the number which have opted out was unexpected by an order of magnitude. i don't know if i'd buy this excuse though
Spooky23 13y ago
No it's not. All states were supposed to have their own exchanges. 14 ended up doing it. New York after all sorts of political machinations agreed to run their own exchange at the 11th hour. (Supposedly "unprecedented" traffic also screwed up the NY exchange, which was also built by some big government contracting firm -- CSC)

jussij 13y ago

> It's not evil, it's just incompetent and embarrassing. And anyone who has worked in the industry over a long period of time will know that for big projects this closer to the norm than the exception. I've personally worked on one massive banking project in the 90s that turned into a billion (in today’s terms) dollar right-off and in that time I read of many other such disasters.

dersen 13y ago

Agreed. While it sounds cool to bring in a "dream team" of technical experts to save the day, it seems likely that additional non-technical issues are at play besides (or in addition to) the technical incompetence of the contractor. Here's an alternate scenario: 1. The government agency that hired the contractors does not completely understand the business requirements in a way that allows them to effectively communicate them to the contractor. This could be due to numerous factors outside their control such as changing legislation or perhaps because the ACA is so large (900+ pages) and relatively new that there are few experts who understand the minute details sufficiently to specify how the exchange should work. 2. New requirements emerge at the last minute, requiring the contractor to make significant changes. While it is recognized that additional schedule time would be needed to sufficiently implement and test the required features, there is enormous pressure (political and otherwise) to adhere to the October 1 release date, so the implementation of the features is rushed and QA is skipped. 3. There are dependencies on legacy government and commercial systems that are outside the control of the contracting agency and the contractor. The functionality of these systems impact reliability and performance, introduce strange bugs, etc. 5. The software is delivered on time but is woefully inadequate. While I wouldn't rule out the incompetence of the technical staff, these types of issues can often be traceable to problems that are more in the realm of management.