9 ms·

“The real problems are with the back end of the software”

125 points by wwilson 13y ago

ams6110 13y ago
Slow, legacy backend systems are not an intractable problem. You can do things such as copy the data to a faster cache, or you use some kind of queuing system so that queries are processed only as fast as the backend can handle (of course the frontend needs to be able to "check back later" for the results). This does support the widely held disbelief that this system will be fixed anytime soon. Clearly the management of the project and the design of the architecture are/were fundamentally flawed, and its very unlikely that it can be fixed in 30 days or whatever at this point.
- hga 13y ago
  Indeed, as you note there are a bunch of fixes possible for slow back ends. A lot of the data is sufficiently static (e.g. from the IRS, what are the numbers for your 2012 taxes, what's your withholding to date for 2013?) that occasional exports to a database inside of "healthcare.gov" might do the trick. In many cases setting up a fake server mimicking the legacy one with such a static data store behind it could get around some of the "can't change the architecture in 7 weeks" issue. Maybe (that deadline is for those who are learning Obamacare outlawed their old policies, 16 million by one estimate for that subset). We've also read that Experian is doing both identification and income verification, so they're probably not as hopeless. The management was, as just about everyone is noting, fatally flawed. However it's been reported to have changed, to QSSI becoming the integrator, and the fix-it czar is saying the right reality recognizing things, like the top item on his punch list is to stop sending garbage to the insurers. Presumably the managers still in the chain of command at the White House on down have been convinced to stop making requirements changes.... We'll see.
- vinhboy 13y ago
  Regardless of how hard it was to make a functioning "data hub", they should have, at the very least, built a functioning registration system that is independent of all other fail points. This way, at the very least, they could have the names and contact information of everyone who wanted to fill out a form. Then they can go back and process the forms at a later date.
  - hga 13y ago
    Supposedly the problem there was a very late change from somewhere in the White House to CMS, in August or September, to preclude the possibility of window shopping and require registration with a lot of verification up front. E.g. we know Experian is part of that process, said to be for identification and income verification. It's been reported that people who don't have credit records (e.g. those sufficiently ill they've stayed under the care of their families) get told by Healthcare.gov to contact Experian, who then upon discovering they don't have a record of them tells them they have to get the Healthcare.gov people to create a “Manual Process Identity Proof” ... which few if any of them know how to do, or whom to send someone to.
    - lnanek2 13y ago
      That's what I hated most about healthcare.gov. Other sites I could get a quote quite easily and decide to go with them or not. healthcare.gov had a bunch of forms that didn't work so I couldn't get a quote after hours of trying. Even if I let long loading pages sit there for long periods of time, some failed out and other times my data was lost.
colomon 13y ago
Can anyone verify this info? I was a bit surprised to see it wasn't better sourced than the comments of a previous Marginal Revolution post. (Nothing against MR, but this seems like huge news if true.)
- hga 13y ago
  Well, it's been established all these external data sources are being used. So its either on-line, maybe with caching (maybe someday), or using a periodically run off off-line copy inside of Healthcare.gov, right? I'll bet the House hearings made clear which is happening.
critium 13y ago
I've worked in and out of the public sector for the last 10 years and unfortunately, this actually _PAR FOR THE COURSE_. This is not the contractors fault. Its the government. Before I left to work with a startup, I was abhorred by the lack of ownership on the client's side. Everybody is looking to shuffle responsibility, keep the lowest profile, and do the least amount of work. It doesnt matter who's writing the code, unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side, large projects are destined to fail and better left off to be written by the public sector. This is government waste at its best. I'm neither republican or democrat but just to add, if my rinky dink app I was working on for the Dept. Of Commerce gets shown to the president when its in 'ALPHA' state, there is no way the most informed person in the world didnt know that the site was going to fail from the get-go.
- hga 13y ago
  "unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side" The newly appointed fix-it czar, Jeffrey Zients, definitely sounds competent from his current remarks (see elsewhere in this topic his top priority), hopefully he can muster enough passion for the Maximum Effort required. And, yeah, I've done some work for the public sector and it's that bad, sometimes worse. In the last case, an entity had Lockheed make an at least half-bespoke (custom) system, which worked pretty well. Then put out continued maintenance on bid, Lockheed didn't win that contract, and years later, as the DEC Alpha systems were nearing their end of life (the line was of course killed by Compaq/HP), it was discovered the sources Lockheed left behind wouldn't compile into the binaries used (e.g. they used SCCS (!!!) ... until a few months before launch). First by a guy they had to let go after a month or so because of budget screwups, then by me over a year later. But of course the plan and budget was predicated on a doesn't match reality estimate of work to be done by another contractor long before. Needless to say the clients didn't understand the difference between source and binary code, or how they'd painted themselves into a really difficult to exit corner. As for failing, CMS in its role as integrator did do integration tests 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch. They of course failed hard.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  It's the contractors' fault, too. Both parties are playing the same game, here: corporate welfare for the contractors, who usually are owned or operated by people with connections to the government, and long-term job security for the government project management officials who oversee these things. I don't know if you've ever worked for a contractor, but I have, and I guarantee you the same responsibility shuffling, profile munging, least-amount-of-work attitude exists there. Without it, these contractors wouldn't be able to keep feeding at the trough with the rest of their corporate welfare recipient friends (while they bitch to each other about how evil liberals are, how disgusting entitlements are, etc.).
microcolonel 13y ago
Since when have they even been good enough at this to critique? They're going to continue to suck royally, as royalty does.
waterside81 13y ago
Hyperbole aside ("... an act which would border on criminal negligence if it was done in the private sector and someone was harmed ..." - what does that even mean? So all of us who have shipped buggy software for our customers are borderline criminals?) - this doesn't surprise me in having dealt with the VA. They have legacy upon legacy upon legacy, with all sorts of fun limitations like not being able to have a "\t" in your content because that'll screw up their backend which relies on tab-delimited data. Health care in the US is playing catch up technology wise to almost every industry. And not for lack of technology, but for lack of political will power. My favourite example of this was trying to deploy an app within the VA that was written in Django. I was told "Python is not on the list of acceptable languages." So we came back to them and said, "Good news everyone, we ported it to Java." Of course, it was just Jython, but that's the sort of stuff you encounter. Multiply this by the complexity involved in trying to herd all these cats into one backend like healthcare.gov and it was doomed to fail.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  Such projects are doomed to fail because Big.corp, as well as USA.gov doesn't get that they're not using the right people. High profile project? Want it to work? Hire the right people. Want the right people? Pay whatever it takes. I've been involved in more such projects than I care to remember, and the problem is always the same. A project manager with rudimentary delivery process knowledge owns a large technology project. What's needed is a technically astute lead that knows how to abstract away from delicate backend dependencies, knows that some projects need big design up front, and knows people that have the specializations he or she doesn't. .Gov projects unfortunately are turf wars, where people scramble for a piece of the cake because money smells good, and success is someone else's problem
  - hga 13y ago
    Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy tells us this will almost always be the case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...): "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." And this amplified restatement: "...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
jroseattle 13y ago
"The front end technology is not the problem here." Let me fix that statement: "The front end technology is not the worst problem here." Looking at the resources loaded for the sign-in page, I counted 58 separate Javascript files. Including one that implied by name was minified, which on inspection clearly was not. I didn't bother counting CSS or image resources. I returned to the page two days ago, which indicated it is down for scheduled maintenance. It remains in this state. CGI obviously borked this project. The government deserves its own special classification of criticism, but poor planning, change management, etc. from the government is no excuse for CGI not building an architecturally sound web site. The contract was $350 million? Good grief, they overpaid. Nonetheless, if we could go back in time AND assuming we needed to spend this budget, here's what I would have done: 1. We make investments of $15 million in 20 different startups, and tell them to implement the initial phase -- let's say we call it the "minimum viable product" or MVP. Each startup has the same deadline for delivery. 2. On the delivery date, all companies meet with us to review their MVP. We call it a "demo day" and view all 20 demos. 3. Through some set of criteria, we create a short list of five companies from the 20 demos. Those five companies receive an additional $5 million investment, and another delivery deadline. 4. The companies iterate on their MVP and come back for another demo, this time with a deep dive. 5. We pick a winner from those five. The winner gets another $25 million investment and is responsible for any additional work to be completed. TechStars for government, essentially.
- rch 13y ago
  You could do it as a SBIR project and get your MVPs for $150K, and still get better results. "Phase I awards are typically $70,000 to $150,000 in size and the period of performance is generally from six to twelve months" http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir20133/preface133.htm http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir20133/pre...
- hga 13y ago
  While I'm sure you're partly correct, until we know how bad the CMS on up management was for this specifically, can we really say that for sure? What we know is: The project didn't get seriously started until February/March (e.g. the election created a 3+ month freeze on HHS publicly visible work). The NYT reported that in the last 10 months, 7 major requirements changes were made. We've been told the "no window shopping" one was made in August or September. We've heard from multiple sources that changes were ordered through the week before launch. Given all the above, how much do you see incompetence, and how much "just not done yet" pre-alpha stuff? I'm mostly a back end developer and am not up to date to judge this, I'm really interested if the above makes any refinements to your judgement.
patja 13y ago
I'm wondering why states were allowed to build their own systems and opt out of the federal site. From the Washington state site we get passwords emailed in clear text, a failure to even allow people to enter all components of their income (resulting in inflated tax credit decisions), using monthly income figures where annual ones should be used (again, more incorrectly inflated tax credits). In Oregon they say they can't even log in or get through the application. Each of these state-specific sites cost tens of millions, each resulting in their own unique set of defects on launch, to implement a federal program. The press seems very focused on the obvious availability and performance problems as well as the errors that come up within the sites that prevent someone from completing their application. There are a whole slew of second-order defects that make it appear your application was successful and correct but were based on incorrect calculations, incomplete data, or other bugs that are not obvious to the user at the time they complete the process.
- jaibot 13y ago
  The original intention was for all the states to build their own exchanges. The more liberal democrats wanted a single federal exchange, but compromised to state-level exchanges to get enough votes for passage. Then the conservative states declined to make their own exchanges so the federal government had to do it anyway, because the American political system makes no sense.
  - hga 13y ago
    Minor correction that proves the rule: "Then all conservative states except Idaho declined to make their own exchanges...." I'd correct your latter statement to "most recently, the American political system makes no sense". Prior to Obamacare, every major entitlement program, from FDR's Social Security to G. W. Bush's Medicare Part D prescription program was passed with large bipartisan majorities, strongly suggesting they had wide majority support. Obamacare famously did not, heck, it only passed within the Democrats by a whisker, and a lot of them found themselves spending more time with their families after their next election. So any sane plan by Team Obama to implement it should have factored in very strong resistance in a lot of places. Heck, I along with 71% of the people in my Purple, very much not Red, home state of Missouri voted in 2010 to outlaw mandates (http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_Freedom,_Proposition_C_(August_2010) http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_F... ) and then in 2012 62% voted to outlaw the creation of a state exchange unless authorized by the people or the legislature (http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_Exchange_Question,_Proposition_E_(2012) http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_E... ).
seivan 13y ago
I don't believe in this anymore "Everyone outsources large portions of their IT, and they should. It’s called specialization and division of labor. If FedEx’s core competence is not in IT, they should outsource their IT to people who know what they are doing." These days I believe each department of government that needs an iPhone application would do better to hire an iOS developer full time to maintain and polish the fuck out of it, continually.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  I tend to agree here. The siren song of 'outsourcing' sounds great, but it's just moving the goal posts, really. The dept/org/staff still need to understand their internal problems well enough to document and communicate them properly, including translating to the outsourcing company. Hiring IT people internally to be there long term to really understand the agency/dept/org/staff and their problems from an IT perspective should be a requirement for any org. Without a competent person who understands IT and the business needs, and has a longer term investment in the business itself, there's little chance of being able to choose an appropriate outsourcing company to do the job (or indeed to define the job competently in the first place).
- Dwolb 13y ago
  It's interesting that a core competence of government isn't IT. How much does the government depend on IT to run its day-to-day business? If the answer is 'not much,' I can understand the opinion that work should be outsourced. If the answer is 'a lot,' then IT should be a core competence and the government should invest in acquiring in-house IT expertise. I'd guess the answer is 'a lot'.
  - GVIrish 13y ago
    Currently government IT is operating under this idiotic idea that almost all IT should contracted out because : "We can fire contractors if they don't do a good job" "Contractors stay up to date on technology" "Contractors are cheaper because we don't have to pay for their government benefits" So for one, contracting companies that do a bad job may lose out on future work. But the reputation of the big companies is never hurt enough by this to get forced to improve. Even then, the fundamental problem is that government employees are very difficult to fire or even hold accountable so people think it's easier to hire contractors. When really the problem that needs to be solved is accountability in government. Secondly, even if developers who work for contractors stay more up to date, it's really irrelevant because the government is extremely slow to upgrade on anything. We're still running Windows XP in a lot of places. Third, if the bill rate for a developer is about 3-6 times what you'd pay a full time government developer, you're not really saving money on benefits. The thinking is that you only pay a contractor for a few years while they develop something for you, but IT is a continuing need. If your operation relies on software (which almost all of them do), you're going to be paying 3-5 times the cost per developer for the foreseeable future. Over time that certainly costs more than government employees.
chernevik 13y ago
Yes, and the problems are probably still worse than this. Because integration means integrating _requirements_, leading to determination and priority of requirements. The current organizational structure doesn't seem to have anyone responsible for even coordinating that. But even if there were, they would need terrific knowledge of each agency's internal systems and legal requirements to determine what is and isn't necessary. And enormous authority, meaning both credibility and power to dictate, to get their determinations to stick. Absent someone looking over the process, each agency will just "require" everything they might need or want. Leaving something out is risky, unless you know a lot about what you are doing and what will happen next and trust your management. Even if they had all those latter characteristics, bureaucracies don't do risk. We all know how complexity grows exponentially. I bet the requirements document for this thing doesn't exist, and if it did it would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Here is my wild theory: The possibility this could succeed died the day Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination for Secretary of HHS. Not that Daschle himself is special, though he is pretty bright. But he was slated for an unusual joint role, running HHS and a White House appointment running the health care effort. A position like that might have had access to the specialized knowledge to know what needed doing and the Presidential delegation of power to get it done. If IRS says "we must have X" and Daschle KNOWS they don't because a real expert knows they don't, he can get them in line or they can explain the problem to the President's chief of staff. Here is the wild part. Daschle was canned, inexplicably, over a truly stupid tax issue (didn't declare a car service as income), while others had far more serious issues waived (Geithner lied about CASH income despite instruction to declare it). Why? I speculate, precisely because the role he designed for himself was remarkably powerful, and effectively outside any review because of the complexity and specialization of its task. Wouldn't the President want someone with the power and knowledge to implement his most important policy? Yes, but not someone beyond his control. Politicians are about power. JFK didn't use the legislative skill of Johnson because he feared Johnson would serve Johnson's interest, not Kennedy's. Once Obama and his people realized that Daschle could become effective President, and Obama something of a titular head of state, they shivved him. It's all speculation. But it is all plausible enough to suggest why government doesn't work. Massively complicated projects like Google work because its people are, by and large, working for a common purpose on tasks that are commonly understood under common accountability. Government and bureaucracy are fundamentally divided in purpose and understanding. The components can be united by power and knowledge, but by its very nature the system resists establishment of such power and knowledge.
devx 13y ago
I just hope that when this whole mess of a project goes online, and is hacked to death, NSA & friends won't be using this an opportunity to tell us that "see, this is why you need to give us bigger funds and spy on everyon - to protect you against those hackers (offensively)!" - even though the whole issue would be the bad programming and security of the system.
whistlerbrk 13y ago
"Or IBM, which has become little more than an IT service provider to other companies?" Come now, that's absurd. Incredible things happen at IBM research.
taternuts 13y ago
> Amazingly, none of this was tested until a week or two before the rollout, and the tests failed. This is absolutely incredible.... two weeks?! Dealing with these legacy systems should have been the absolute first thing tested, is it not the most likely point of failure/bottleneck? Someone on the team had to have been screaming about this and ignored, all the while shitting their pants waiting for go live for the whole thing to crumble.
snorkel 13y ago
I don't know how much of this is true, but I bet the truth is no less hilarious. It wouldn't surprise me if this system has no concept of usability and offline processing queues. No matter how complex it is to process an application it's common sense to just give the user immediate feedback "Thank you for your order. We'll contact you by email within N days to followup and report your application status." Do these people expect Amazon to process orders in realtime and fling physical goods at their door in minutes? Should buying health coverage be zero conf one click instantaneous?
- hga 13y ago
  Well, I've heard there was a "7 second" response time metric that was part of the plan. But, yes, Amazon's "eventually consistent" system takes its time, e.g. while it's never happened to me, I know that somewhat delayed confirmation email is only made when the whole system has reserved a book for me, even if there's only one copy in stock and someone else made an order for it at about the same time. Etc.
ape4 13y ago
The frontend assumed the backend was fast enough. That's the problem. If the frontend was made to handle really slow responses from the backend it would look different. It would not make people wait while transactions occurred. Or if might have a page that that displayed your progress: in other to do this for you we need to contact 10 databases - here is the progress of each: Database One: [=======----------] Database Two: [============-----] Database Three: [==---------------]
- hga 13y ago
  Heh. But I would half joke that that would result in a bunch of angry people with torches and pitchforks showing up at sites of the owners of Database Two.... Which might be totally unfair if it's not really their fault.
  - ape4 13y ago
    My ASCII graphics were trying to show Database Two as fast and Database Three as slow. That's where the pitchfork toting mobs should be.
    - hga 13y ago
      Oh, yeah, progress toward completion, which would obvious to most everyone using the site. But I'm sure some would get it wrong even then! Visions of a family gathered around the monitor: "Go IRS!" "Social Security, we KNOW you can do it!" Etc. (I do really like your idea, it just seems to be inevitably politically impossible.)
vpeters25 13y ago
"... for some inexplicable reason the administration decided to make the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services the integration lead for a massive IT project despite the fact that CMS has no experience managing large IT projects" Time Magazine's "Bitter Pill" article stated Medicare had an IT system that made them more efficient than private health insurance providers. Isn't such a system large enough?
- hga 13y ago
  Doesn't mean CMS was the integrator for any of the systems it uses, or any really big ones. E.g. I don't rag on CGI Federal as much as some others, because they're responsible for CMS.gov and Medicare.gov, and the latter is more than "good enough for government work" ^_^.
bhauer 13y ago
I have not followed the development of this news closely, but skimming these updates has been amusing. I do have a couple very basic questions. If these are stupid, I apologize ahead of time. My understanding from previous coverage is that some of the state exchange sites, such as California's, are performing acceptably. If that is true, do those state sites also connect to and query the same legacy systems as the federal site? If so, why doesn't the federal government simply ask for or take that code? Surely it's been made available to them? If not, are the legal requirements for the states' exchanges somehow different than the federal site? That seems unlikely since my understanding is the federal site is simply standing in for states that elected to not create exchange sites. I don't see why it would be subject to extra requirements. What am I missing here?
- hga 13y ago
  First thing is only 4 state sites are reliably reported to be working well, and California's isn't one of them, although their's might be fixed by now. I haven't heard of any that didn't really do integration testing, and Hawaii and Oregon declined to launch their not ready sites Oct 1st. The obvious answer is that until late last week, the grossly incompetent CMS (and some people in the White House and perhaps others in HHS) were running the show. Now that it's under new management, maybe that possibility will be investigated. On the other hand, with a 7 week deadline for those who must get new insurance for 2014, like the 16 million with now outlawed, not grandfathered individual policies ... there's not much time to do something that disruptive. But an idea worth checking out in the next week or so.
malandrew 13y ago
Strangely, based on the title I thought this was going to be about future startup trends. i.e. For the last 6 years or so we've seen a revolution in interface design as a competitive advantage when creating a new startup, but as the low hanging fruit opportunities are used up, as lot of the really meaty opportunities are going to be in software where there is a significant backend component performing a lot of heavy lifting and magic. I'm not in the least bit surprised to see that a lot of the work and resulting problems with healthcare.gov are on the backend. I just wish the government realized that we have all these amazing developers over in the Bay Area that can do a better job than the majority of those developers currently writing software for government contracts. I'm shocked no one in government has said to themselves "What do we have to do to make our software problems accessible to the types of engineers working at the Googles and Dropboxes of the world.
- hga 13y ago
  If you've ever done government contracting, you'd know as things stand now a large fraction of those "amazing developers" wouldn't put up with its insanities when they have good alternatives. E.g. would you be happy filling out time sheets for exactly 40 hours, no matter what you did or should do? I've done this twice. Once for a NASA project where my smaller company was doing work NASA judged as too hard for CSC; that my manager was one of the best ever certainly made a difference, as well as getting any tool I asked for (ah, I was among other things cleaning up after another consultant to this company abjectly failed). Not sure how long I would have done it if that was an option (the NASA consulting contract was eliminated altogether when Clinton downsized NASA). The other one I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, and I quit in disgust after less than 2 months.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  Having the best developers in the world is useless if you have incompetent management. In this case, requirements were delivered extremely late, and they were still in flux up to a week before deployment. The system integrator went forward with only ONE WEEK of integration testing. There were 55 companies involved in this, not to mention all the state exchanges and other federal software systems that had to be integrated. Better developers would have made a positive impact, but nowhere near enough to make this project a success.
robomartin 13y ago
...and the website is not the worst part of the ACA ride we are now on. Part of me has been ignoring a lot of the chatter around the ACA as potential right wing fabricated drama. Too much noise and bilateral bullshit being thrown about these days. That was until a few days ago, when I would learn our insurance has both more than doubled in cost and is also scheduled for cancellation. Doubled and cancelled. All as a direct result of the ACA. Brilliant! To say this was shocking is an understatement. Our annual cost will go well past $15K. There's a tragedy of unintended consequences, side effects and direct effects, being played out in the background that hasn't completely come to the surface yet. We certainly can't be the last family to get news of this kind. That means in the coming months it is likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of additional individuals and families are going to receive these dreaded letters. Apparently hundreds of thousands already have. Last week was our turn. At one point this and other issues will be difficult to ignore. And they will dwarf the IT issues. The website, as much of a disaster as it is, is likely to pale in comparison to all of the other, non IT, issues. Some of what's happening is related to the incredible disconnect between Washington and technology. All you need to do is listen to some of these folks talk about the website issue to see how little they understand. I heard one senator say something akin to "they just have to re-enter a list of five million codes". In other words, the term "code" to some of these guys means "numbers" and that someone made a data entry error in copying "codes" into the website. BSS (Balaji Srinivasan) covered some of this in his excellent Startup School talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A A talk which, he comments, has been mutated into something far different from what he said by the modern equivalent of the "broken telephone" game. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619068 I agree very much with his suggestion that an "exit" is required. Not meaning that we ought to pull-up roots and go, but rather that the tech community ought to almost ignore the dinosaurs and go ahead and evolve a society more aligned to modern realities. In his talk he gives examples of various US cities that have been "exited" to some extent through technologies developed in the free market. To some extent, it's an Innovator's Dilemma kind of a problem. http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244 http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B... The only way to make step changes is to do it well outside of the organization looking after the status quo, because that's all they know and that's all they can focus on.
greenyoda 13y ago
"There are no easy fixes for the fact that a 30 year old mainframe can not handle thousands of simultaneous queries. And upgrading all the back-end systems is a bigger job than the web site itself. Some of those systems are still there because attempts to upgrade them failed in the past. Too much legacy software, too many other co-reliant systems, etc." 30 year old (1983) mainframes and databases were designed to handle large transaction loads. For example, airline reservation systems and banking systems were built on them. And upgrading a mainframe (at least an IBM mainframe) to a faster mainframe isn't such a daunting task, since all the code from 30 years ago (or even from the 1960s) is still object-code compatible with the new machines - you can make it run even if you've lost your source code. There's still lots of 30 year old (and older) Cobol code running on mainframes today. I agree that re-writing the 30 year old software would be hard, but simply getting it to run faster could probably be done just by spending money on the latest mainframes and disk drives. But if nobody ever did a load test on the site, they wouldn't have known that they had to do this. They probably just thought: "Oh, we have to write a web site that talks to a bunch of databases, how hard could that be?" (By the way, they could have written test code to do a load test on those legacy systems without even having a web site running. In retrospect, that's the first thing they should have done, and it would have shown them that their critical path wasn't the user interface.)
- hga 13y ago
  You make very good points about early load testing. Unfortunately, as detailed in so many places including the OP, the integrator, the government's CMS, clearly didn't have the expertise to realize this. E.g. any vaguely competent at software development organization knows you have to freeze the requirements well before the week before the launch, and not make major changes less than 2 months before (the heavy registration process instead of allowing window shopping).
- GVIrish 13y ago
  In theory you could at least improve the hardware the legacy systems is running on. In practice that may not have been anywhere near enough to ensure success. 1. In this case you would've had to start benchmarking the performance of the legacy systems early, far earlier than when they started development in March. If you determine that hardware upgrades are needed, then you'd need to initiate procurement and upgrade projects at one or more of these other agencies. Projects like that may not necessarily be quick to implement. Maybe the physical space can't accommodate new hardware. Maybe there isn't enough budget to do an upgrade like that. Maybe there aren't enough personnel resources to plan and implement an upgrade of that scale quickly. Maybe those organizations are just barely keeping their heads above water with the way those systems are currently functioning. Maybe they don't even have a handle on what their hardware configuration is. I know someone who worked at an agency where they had to start unplugging stuff to figure out what server did what. 2. This is all making the assumption that the data in those systems is correct and well-formed, and the business logic in those systems is free of bugs. Maybe you get the database schema and find out that A. It's out of date, B. There's no data dictionary, and C. There's 250k lines of business logic tied up in undocumented triggers. Good luck. Load testing might just be the tip of the iceberg in situations like this. But bottom line is, if the people leading your project don't even think to start looking into this kind of stuff very early on, you might be screwed before you even started.
snowwrestler 13y ago
I think the easiest fix at this point is to simply design around the known delay in synchronizing all the 3rd party data calls. Have people enter their info, then show them a screen that says "your quote will be emailed to you in 24 hours." Then the integration system has 24 hours to retry any failed data pulls, match up all the data, and generate a quote.
- hga 13y ago
  Problems: An insistence on a heavy (throughtly validated) registration process. People want to have choices. Maybe they don't want to get insurance from company A. There are also monthly payment vs. deductible tradeoffs in the Bronze vs. Silver etc. plans. And some demand cost sharing after you've used up your deductible (I wouldn't really care if the plan had a 10 million dollar limit if I was expected to pay 20-30% of that...). ADDED: plus you must be able to see if your doctors are in a plan's network. Despite the "one size fits all" new minimum gold plated plan, there's still a lot of tradeoffs ... and then email isn't necessarily reliable enough for the response. I can't see them avoiding a "or check back on the site tomorrow..." option.
pessimizer 13y ago
The real problem is with the weird indirection of the US government providing payment to doctors/hospitals/pharma through subsidies, tax breaks, and tax penalties granted to or extracted from citizens that can only be spent at private insurance companies or mitigated by spending at private insurance companies who then, in turn, pay for your healthcare. The sheer complexity of this rent-seeking indirection makes keeping track of the millions of distinct participant-instances that can play out in hundreds of different ways, involving integrating tens of massive legacy systems with new, flexible business logic (for a law in flux), impractical. With single-payer, they could have scrapped the vast majority of this complexity.
fauigerzigerk 13y ago
Focusing on the performance or scalability of these ancient backend systems is beside the point. It's simply not a great idea to connect a significant number of backend systems run by different organizations in one synchronous online transaction. The overall probability of failure may simply be too high, irrespective of any scalability issues.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
The answer is that you can't structure the transaction as a realtime query. You have to structure it as something that's sent and gives you a ticket, and the reply associated with that ticket will come back in its own time. Stick the processing pipeline in Twitter Storm (which can retry any step until the whole pipeline is done) and structure the requests as nearly-idempotent (so a repeated reply is harmless, and the first arrival associated with the ticket wins). Finally, you have an "inbox" where people can wait for and see their answer, with optional SMS and email notification.
- hga 13y ago
  Interesting, but at some point people have to be shown a selection of offerings. That selection must allow seeing if your doctors are in the network. Your suggestion would allow for that, but not I sense in the "instant gratification" way we're used to dealing with web sites. I.e. "thanks for your input, wait for SMS/email/N hours till you log in again for the next step". BTW, I've read it's a 30 step process. Not all will require "take a ticket and wait to be called", but more than 1 or 2 I suspect.
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    Well, they aren't getting instant gratification now, are they? I suspect a lot could be cached - that is you take a list of questions up front, what comes back from the "ticket reply" contains any further questions you'd need to answer and enough canned data to process the replies immediately. So you wouldn't need to take a ticket more than once. But even if you did need to, at least it would be something people could fill in and walk away from. They wouldn't be kept around, drumming their fingers and worrying about being late to work.
    - hga 13y ago
      "Well, they aren't getting instant gratification now, are they?" Indeed! But I was referring to the initial architecture of the site. E.g. the March objective, “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” expressed by Henry Chao, CMS CIO, who in theory should have been in the front lines. Sigh, I bet he was, knew what was coming but didn't have the authority to make it work, or as you implicitly suggest, down-grade the architecture/expectations into something that might possibly work in the time left. And then there's the last minute (well, month) change to requiring a heavy duty, validated up the wazoo registration before doing anything. Doubt they could have made that work in less than 2 months ... maybe. This was needed, but at lower transaction rates, e.g. otherwise window shopping would allow a lot of people to see they couldn't get a better deal through the exchange (e.g. no subsidies for you, which only the federal system is allowed to calculate). Suppose prior to that they arranged for "X rate of idempotent reads" with e.g. the IRS, and now they need a 10/100/1000X rate, meaning they should have cached everything that doesn't change quickly. Almost certainly too late to do it by then. My, my, years from now this is going to be one of the most significant case studies in project development.
digikata 13y ago
"Failure isn’t rare for government IT projects – it’s the norm. Over 90% of them fail to deliver on time" Is this really much different than the success rate of startup culture where VC's count themselves successful if 10% of their investments yield a return? The startup environment has the "success rate advantage" that if the venture really isn't getting traction, you can walk away from it, or change directions a do something related, but not your original objective. Government projects like the healthcare exchange don't have that degree of freedom - if they go down the wrong track, the only choice is put in more resources until it's back on track. Giving up or changing objectives isn't a decision under the control of the project - it's a legislative or budgetary question.
narrator 13y ago
Only supports 200 simultaneous transactions ay? Well just put a big ol' queue on the front of it with a hard thread limit and tell people they'll get an email when it's ready.
- hga 13y ago
  But it crashed at 200 in the testing the week before launch.... For all we know it crashed at 2 "truly simultaneous" attempts. I've watched more than one project run beautifully until they attempted a second simultaneous logged in user, which is not quite the same thing, but....
dreamdu5t 13y ago
The problem is government contracting. CGI will continue to get contracts. The problem is a system where if you don't deliver you get paid millions of dollars and still get jobs.
erichocean 13y ago
As an aside, when I hear about the problems they're having understanding the legacy data formats, it makes me wonder how far you could get with a high-powered, big data NLP system to "parse" the data. Sort of like how Google translate works. There are rules, after all, they're just not written down. Why not let the computer figure them out, with continuous training from people until the computer's accuracy is high enough? I suspect instead they tried to write parsers and trusted "the spec", which was never even right the day it was written down. :)
USNetizen 13y ago
The issue I see here is the author of this article has marginal experience with federal contracting. "The people who wrote the code for these systems are long gone...they are prone to transaction timeouts" ... wrong, wrong and wrong. There are plenty of coders still around maintaining these systems, even with the obscure technologies like MUMPS and all and they are running on rather robust hardware in huge datacenters. Second of all, the government should NEVER outsource integration - the systems integrator requires an authority to manage other contractors that only the government is capable of holding.
- hga 13y ago
  Are you really sure about your first point? I have a state government counterexample here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622223 As for the second, whatever might be right, we've been told that only the Pentagon has retained that ability for "medium sized" weapons projects. Anyone know anything to the contrary?
natural219 13y ago
"Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. As suggested by the above redesigns of the train timetable, bookstore, and movie listings, many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic." "Interaction considered harmful", by Bret Victor http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

125 points by wwilson 13y ago

Slow, legacy backend systems are not an intractable problem. You can do things such as copy the data to a faster cache, or you use some kind of queuing system so that queries are processed only as fast as the backend can handle (of course the frontend needs to be able to "check back later" for the results). This does support the widely held disbelief that this system will be fixed anytime soon. Clearly the management of the project and the design of the architecture are/were fundamentally flawed, and its very unlikely that it can be fixed in 30 days or whatever at this point.

hga 13y ago
Indeed, as you note there are a bunch of fixes possible for slow back ends. A lot of the data is sufficiently static (e.g. from the IRS, what are the numbers for your 2012 taxes, what's your withholding to date for 2013?) that occasional exports to a database inside of "healthcare.gov" might do the trick. In many cases setting up a fake server mimicking the legacy one with such a static data store behind it could get around some of the "can't change the architecture in 7 weeks" issue. Maybe (that deadline is for those who are learning Obamacare outlawed their old policies, 16 million by one estimate for that subset). We've also read that Experian is doing both identification and income verification, so they're probably not as hopeless. The management was, as just about everyone is noting, fatally flawed. However it's been reported to have changed, to QSSI becoming the integrator, and the fix-it czar is saying the right reality recognizing things, like the top item on his punch list is to stop sending garbage to the insurers. Presumably the managers still in the chain of command at the White House on down have been convinced to stop making requirements changes.... We'll see.
vinhboy 13y ago
Regardless of how hard it was to make a functioning "data hub", they should have, at the very least, built a functioning registration system that is independent of all other fail points. This way, at the very least, they could have the names and contact information of everyone who wanted to fill out a form. Then they can go back and process the forms at a later date.
- hga 13y ago
  Supposedly the problem there was a very late change from somewhere in the White House to CMS, in August or September, to preclude the possibility of window shopping and require registration with a lot of verification up front. E.g. we know Experian is part of that process, said to be for identification and income verification. It's been reported that people who don't have credit records (e.g. those sufficiently ill they've stayed under the care of their families) get told by Healthcare.gov to contact Experian, who then upon discovering they don't have a record of them tells them they have to get the Healthcare.gov people to create a “Manual Process Identity Proof” ... which few if any of them know how to do, or whom to send someone to.
  - lnanek2 13y ago
    That's what I hated most about healthcare.gov. Other sites I could get a quote quite easily and decide to go with them or not. healthcare.gov had a bunch of forms that didn't work so I couldn't get a quote after hours of trying. Even if I let long loading pages sit there for long periods of time, some failed out and other times my data was lost.

colomon 13y ago

Can anyone verify this info? I was a bit surprised to see it wasn't better sourced than the comments of a previous Marginal Revolution post. (Nothing against MR, but this seems like huge news if true.)

hga 13y ago
Well, it's been established all these external data sources are being used. So its either on-line, maybe with caching (maybe someday), or using a periodically run off off-line copy inside of Healthcare.gov, right? I'll bet the House hearings made clear which is happening.

critium 13y ago

I've worked in and out of the public sector for the last 10 years and unfortunately, this actually _PAR FOR THE COURSE_. This is not the contractors fault. Its the government. Before I left to work with a startup, I was abhorred by the lack of ownership on the client's side. Everybody is looking to shuffle responsibility, keep the lowest profile, and do the least amount of work. It doesnt matter who's writing the code, unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side, large projects are destined to fail and better left off to be written by the public sector. This is government waste at its best. I'm neither republican or democrat but just to add, if my rinky dink app I was working on for the Dept. Of Commerce gets shown to the president when its in 'ALPHA' state, there is no way the most informed person in the world didnt know that the site was going to fail from the get-go.

hga 13y ago
"unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side" The newly appointed fix-it czar, Jeffrey Zients, definitely sounds competent from his current remarks (see elsewhere in this topic his top priority), hopefully he can muster enough passion for the Maximum Effort required. And, yeah, I've done some work for the public sector and it's that bad, sometimes worse. In the last case, an entity had Lockheed make an at least half-bespoke (custom) system, which worked pretty well. Then put out continued maintenance on bid, Lockheed didn't win that contract, and years later, as the DEC Alpha systems were nearing their end of life (the line was of course killed by Compaq/HP), it was discovered the sources Lockheed left behind wouldn't compile into the binaries used (e.g. they used SCCS (!!!) ... until a few months before launch). First by a guy they had to let go after a month or so because of budget screwups, then by me over a year later. But of course the plan and budget was predicated on a doesn't match reality estimate of work to be done by another contractor long before. Needless to say the clients didn't understand the difference between source and binary code, or how they'd painted themselves into a really difficult to exit corner. As for failing, CMS in its role as integrator did do integration tests 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch. They of course failed hard.
Iftheshoefits 13y ago
It's the contractors' fault, too. Both parties are playing the same game, here: corporate welfare for the contractors, who usually are owned or operated by people with connections to the government, and long-term job security for the government project management officials who oversee these things. I don't know if you've ever worked for a contractor, but I have, and I guarantee you the same responsibility shuffling, profile munging, least-amount-of-work attitude exists there. Without it, these contractors wouldn't be able to keep feeding at the trough with the rest of their corporate welfare recipient friends (while they bitch to each other about how evil liberals are, how disgusting entitlements are, etc.).

microcolonel 13y ago

Since when have they even been good enough at this to critique? They're going to continue to suck royally, as royalty does.

waterside81 13y ago

Hyperbole aside ("... an act which would border on criminal negligence if it was done in the private sector and someone was harmed ..." - what does that even mean? So all of us who have shipped buggy software for our customers are borderline criminals?) - this doesn't surprise me in having dealt with the VA. They have legacy upon legacy upon legacy, with all sorts of fun limitations like not being able to have a "\t" in your content because that'll screw up their backend which relies on tab-delimited data. Health care in the US is playing catch up technology wise to almost every industry. And not for lack of technology, but for lack of political will power. My favourite example of this was trying to deploy an app within the VA that was written in Django. I was told "Python is not on the list of acceptable languages." So we came back to them and said, "Good news everyone, we ported it to Java." Of course, it was just Jython, but that's the sort of stuff you encounter. Multiply this by the complexity involved in trying to herd all these cats into one backend like healthcare.gov and it was doomed to fail.

Spearchucker 13y ago
Such projects are doomed to fail because Big.corp, as well as USA.gov doesn't get that they're not using the right people. High profile project? Want it to work? Hire the right people. Want the right people? Pay whatever it takes. I've been involved in more such projects than I care to remember, and the problem is always the same. A project manager with rudimentary delivery process knowledge owns a large technology project. What's needed is a technically astute lead that knows how to abstract away from delicate backend dependencies, knows that some projects need big design up front, and knows people that have the specializations he or she doesn't. .Gov projects unfortunately are turf wars, where people scramble for a piece of the cake because money smells good, and success is someone else's problem
- hga 13y ago
  Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy tells us this will almost always be the case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...): "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." And this amplified restatement: "...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."

jroseattle 13y ago

"The front end technology is not the problem here." Let me fix that statement: "The front end technology is not the worst problem here." Looking at the resources loaded for the sign-in page, I counted 58 separate Javascript files. Including one that implied by name was minified, which on inspection clearly was not. I didn't bother counting CSS or image resources. I returned to the page two days ago, which indicated it is down for scheduled maintenance. It remains in this state. CGI obviously borked this project. The government deserves its own special classification of criticism, but poor planning, change management, etc. from the government is no excuse for CGI not building an architecturally sound web site. The contract was $350 million? Good grief, they overpaid. Nonetheless, if we could go back in time AND assuming we needed to spend this budget, here's what I would have done: 1. We make investments of $15 million in 20 different startups, and tell them to implement the initial phase -- let's say we call it the "minimum viable product" or MVP. Each startup has the same deadline for delivery. 2. On the delivery date, all companies meet with us to review their MVP. We call it a "demo day" and view all 20 demos. 3. Through some set of criteria, we create a short list of five companies from the 20 demos. Those five companies receive an additional $5 million investment, and another delivery deadline. 4. The companies iterate on their MVP and come back for another demo, this time with a deep dive. 5. We pick a winner from those five. The winner gets another $25 million investment and is responsible for any additional work to be completed. TechStars for government, essentially.

rch 13y ago
You could do it as a SBIR project and get your MVPs for $150K, and still get better results. "Phase I awards are typically $70,000 to $150,000 in size and the period of performance is generally from six to twelve months" http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir20133/preface133.htm http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir20133/pre...
hga 13y ago
While I'm sure you're partly correct, until we know how bad the CMS on up management was for this specifically, can we really say that for sure? What we know is: The project didn't get seriously started until February/March (e.g. the election created a 3+ month freeze on HHS publicly visible work). The NYT reported that in the last 10 months, 7 major requirements changes were made. We've been told the "no window shopping" one was made in August or September. We've heard from multiple sources that changes were ordered through the week before launch. Given all the above, how much do you see incompetence, and how much "just not done yet" pre-alpha stuff? I'm mostly a back end developer and am not up to date to judge this, I'm really interested if the above makes any refinements to your judgement.

patja 13y ago

I'm wondering why states were allowed to build their own systems and opt out of the federal site. From the Washington state site we get passwords emailed in clear text, a failure to even allow people to enter all components of their income (resulting in inflated tax credit decisions), using monthly income figures where annual ones should be used (again, more incorrectly inflated tax credits). In Oregon they say they can't even log in or get through the application. Each of these state-specific sites cost tens of millions, each resulting in their own unique set of defects on launch, to implement a federal program. The press seems very focused on the obvious availability and performance problems as well as the errors that come up within the sites that prevent someone from completing their application. There are a whole slew of second-order defects that make it appear your application was successful and correct but were based on incorrect calculations, incomplete data, or other bugs that are not obvious to the user at the time they complete the process.

jaibot 13y ago
The original intention was for all the states to build their own exchanges. The more liberal democrats wanted a single federal exchange, but compromised to state-level exchanges to get enough votes for passage. Then the conservative states declined to make their own exchanges so the federal government had to do it anyway, because the American political system makes no sense.
- hga 13y ago
  Minor correction that proves the rule: "Then all conservative states except Idaho declined to make their own exchanges...." I'd correct your latter statement to "most recently, the American political system makes no sense". Prior to Obamacare, every major entitlement program, from FDR's Social Security to G. W. Bush's Medicare Part D prescription program was passed with large bipartisan majorities, strongly suggesting they had wide majority support. Obamacare famously did not, heck, it only passed within the Democrats by a whisker, and a lot of them found themselves spending more time with their families after their next election. So any sane plan by Team Obama to implement it should have factored in very strong resistance in a lot of places. Heck, I along with 71% of the people in my Purple, very much not Red, home state of Missouri voted in 2010 to outlaw mandates (http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_Freedom,_Proposition_C_(August_2010) http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_F... ) and then in 2012 62% voted to outlaw the creation of a state exchange unless authorized by the people or the legislature (http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_Exchange_Question,_Proposition_E_(2012) http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_E... ).

seivan 13y ago

I don't believe in this anymore "Everyone outsources large portions of their IT, and they should. It’s called specialization and division of labor. If FedEx’s core competence is not in IT, they should outsource their IT to people who know what they are doing." These days I believe each department of government that needs an iPhone application would do better to hire an iOS developer full time to maintain and polish the fuck out of it, continually.

mgkimsal 13y ago
I tend to agree here. The siren song of 'outsourcing' sounds great, but it's just moving the goal posts, really. The dept/org/staff still need to understand their internal problems well enough to document and communicate them properly, including translating to the outsourcing company. Hiring IT people internally to be there long term to really understand the agency/dept/org/staff and their problems from an IT perspective should be a requirement for any org. Without a competent person who understands IT and the business needs, and has a longer term investment in the business itself, there's little chance of being able to choose an appropriate outsourcing company to do the job (or indeed to define the job competently in the first place).
Dwolb 13y ago
It's interesting that a core competence of government isn't IT. How much does the government depend on IT to run its day-to-day business? If the answer is 'not much,' I can understand the opinion that work should be outsourced. If the answer is 'a lot,' then IT should be a core competence and the government should invest in acquiring in-house IT expertise. I'd guess the answer is 'a lot'.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  Currently government IT is operating under this idiotic idea that almost all IT should contracted out because : "We can fire contractors if they don't do a good job" "Contractors stay up to date on technology" "Contractors are cheaper because we don't have to pay for their government benefits" So for one, contracting companies that do a bad job may lose out on future work. But the reputation of the big companies is never hurt enough by this to get forced to improve. Even then, the fundamental problem is that government employees are very difficult to fire or even hold accountable so people think it's easier to hire contractors. When really the problem that needs to be solved is accountability in government. Secondly, even if developers who work for contractors stay more up to date, it's really irrelevant because the government is extremely slow to upgrade on anything. We're still running Windows XP in a lot of places. Third, if the bill rate for a developer is about 3-6 times what you'd pay a full time government developer, you're not really saving money on benefits. The thinking is that you only pay a contractor for a few years while they develop something for you, but IT is a continuing need. If your operation relies on software (which almost all of them do), you're going to be paying 3-5 times the cost per developer for the foreseeable future. Over time that certainly costs more than government employees.

chernevik 13y ago

Yes, and the problems are probably still worse than this. Because integration means integrating _requirements_, leading to determination and priority of requirements. The current organizational structure doesn't seem to have anyone responsible for even coordinating that. But even if there were, they would need terrific knowledge of each agency's internal systems and legal requirements to determine what is and isn't necessary. And enormous authority, meaning both credibility and power to dictate, to get their determinations to stick. Absent someone looking over the process, each agency will just "require" everything they might need or want. Leaving something out is risky, unless you know a lot about what you are doing and what will happen next and trust your management. Even if they had all those latter characteristics, bureaucracies don't do risk. We all know how complexity grows exponentially. I bet the requirements document for this thing doesn't exist, and if it did it would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Here is my wild theory: The possibility this could succeed died the day Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination for Secretary of HHS. Not that Daschle himself is special, though he is pretty bright. But he was slated for an unusual joint role, running HHS and a White House appointment running the health care effort. A position like that might have had access to the specialized knowledge to know what needed doing and the Presidential delegation of power to get it done. If IRS says "we must have X" and Daschle KNOWS they don't because a real expert knows they don't, he can get them in line or they can explain the problem to the President's chief of staff. Here is the wild part. Daschle was canned, inexplicably, over a truly stupid tax issue (didn't declare a car service as income), while others had far more serious issues waived (Geithner lied about CASH income despite instruction to declare it). Why? I speculate, precisely because the role he designed for himself was remarkably powerful, and effectively outside any review because of the complexity and specialization of its task. Wouldn't the President want someone with the power and knowledge to implement his most important policy? Yes, but not someone beyond his control. Politicians are about power. JFK didn't use the legislative skill of Johnson because he feared Johnson would serve Johnson's interest, not Kennedy's. Once Obama and his people realized that Daschle could become effective President, and Obama something of a titular head of state, they shivved him. It's all speculation. But it is all plausible enough to suggest why government doesn't work. Massively complicated projects like Google work because its people are, by and large, working for a common purpose on tasks that are commonly understood under common accountability. Government and bureaucracy are fundamentally divided in purpose and understanding. The components can be united by power and knowledge, but by its very nature the system resists establishment of such power and knowledge.

devx 13y ago

I just hope that when this whole mess of a project goes online, and is hacked to death, NSA & friends won't be using this an opportunity to tell us that "see, this is why you need to give us bigger funds and spy on everyon - to protect you against those hackers (offensively)!" - even though the whole issue would be the bad programming and security of the system.

whistlerbrk 13y ago

"Or IBM, which has become little more than an IT service provider to other companies?" Come now, that's absurd. Incredible things happen at IBM research.

taternuts 13y ago

> Amazingly, none of this was tested until a week or two before the rollout, and the tests failed. This is absolutely incredible.... two weeks?! Dealing with these legacy systems should have been the absolute first thing tested, is it not the most likely point of failure/bottleneck? Someone on the team had to have been screaming about this and ignored, all the while shitting their pants waiting for go live for the whole thing to crumble.

snorkel 13y ago

I don't know how much of this is true, but I bet the truth is no less hilarious. It wouldn't surprise me if this system has no concept of usability and offline processing queues. No matter how complex it is to process an application it's common sense to just give the user immediate feedback "Thank you for your order. We'll contact you by email within N days to followup and report your application status." Do these people expect Amazon to process orders in realtime and fling physical goods at their door in minutes? Should buying health coverage be zero conf one click instantaneous?

hga 13y ago
Well, I've heard there was a "7 second" response time metric that was part of the plan. But, yes, Amazon's "eventually consistent" system takes its time, e.g. while it's never happened to me, I know that somewhat delayed confirmation email is only made when the whole system has reserved a book for me, even if there's only one copy in stock and someone else made an order for it at about the same time. Etc.

ape4 13y ago

The frontend assumed the backend was fast enough. That's the problem. If the frontend was made to handle really slow responses from the backend it would look different. It would not make people wait while transactions occurred. Or if might have a page that that displayed your progress: in other to do this for you we need to contact 10 databases - here is the progress of each: Database One: [=======----------] Database Two: [============-----] Database Three: [==---------------]

hga 13y ago
Heh. But I would half joke that that would result in a bunch of angry people with torches and pitchforks showing up at sites of the owners of Database Two.... Which might be totally unfair if it's not really their fault.
- ape4 13y ago
  My ASCII graphics were trying to show Database Two as fast and Database Three as slow. That's where the pitchfork toting mobs should be.
  - hga 13y ago
    Oh, yeah, progress toward completion, which would obvious to most everyone using the site. But I'm sure some would get it wrong even then! Visions of a family gathered around the monitor: "Go IRS!" "Social Security, we KNOW you can do it!" Etc. (I do really like your idea, it just seems to be inevitably politically impossible.)

vpeters25 13y ago

"... for some inexplicable reason the administration decided to make the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services the integration lead for a massive IT project despite the fact that CMS has no experience managing large IT projects" Time Magazine's "Bitter Pill" article stated Medicare had an IT system that made them more efficient than private health insurance providers. Isn't such a system large enough?

hga 13y ago
Doesn't mean CMS was the integrator for any of the systems it uses, or any really big ones. E.g. I don't rag on CGI Federal as much as some others, because they're responsible for CMS.gov and Medicare.gov, and the latter is more than "good enough for government work" ^_^.

bhauer 13y ago

I have not followed the development of this news closely, but skimming these updates has been amusing. I do have a couple very basic questions. If these are stupid, I apologize ahead of time. My understanding from previous coverage is that some of the state exchange sites, such as California's, are performing acceptably. If that is true, do those state sites also connect to and query the same legacy systems as the federal site? If so, why doesn't the federal government simply ask for or take that code? Surely it's been made available to them? If not, are the legal requirements for the states' exchanges somehow different than the federal site? That seems unlikely since my understanding is the federal site is simply standing in for states that elected to not create exchange sites. I don't see why it would be subject to extra requirements. What am I missing here?

hga 13y ago
First thing is only 4 state sites are reliably reported to be working well, and California's isn't one of them, although their's might be fixed by now. I haven't heard of any that didn't really do integration testing, and Hawaii and Oregon declined to launch their not ready sites Oct 1st. The obvious answer is that until late last week, the grossly incompetent CMS (and some people in the White House and perhaps others in HHS) were running the show. Now that it's under new management, maybe that possibility will be investigated. On the other hand, with a 7 week deadline for those who must get new insurance for 2014, like the 16 million with now outlawed, not grandfathered individual policies ... there's not much time to do something that disruptive. But an idea worth checking out in the next week or so.

malandrew 13y ago

Strangely, based on the title I thought this was going to be about future startup trends. i.e. For the last 6 years or so we've seen a revolution in interface design as a competitive advantage when creating a new startup, but as the low hanging fruit opportunities are used up, as lot of the really meaty opportunities are going to be in software where there is a significant backend component performing a lot of heavy lifting and magic. I'm not in the least bit surprised to see that a lot of the work and resulting problems with healthcare.gov are on the backend. I just wish the government realized that we have all these amazing developers over in the Bay Area that can do a better job than the majority of those developers currently writing software for government contracts. I'm shocked no one in government has said to themselves "What do we have to do to make our software problems accessible to the types of engineers working at the Googles and Dropboxes of the world.

hga 13y ago
If you've ever done government contracting, you'd know as things stand now a large fraction of those "amazing developers" wouldn't put up with its insanities when they have good alternatives. E.g. would you be happy filling out time sheets for exactly 40 hours, no matter what you did or should do? I've done this twice. Once for a NASA project where my smaller company was doing work NASA judged as too hard for CSC; that my manager was one of the best ever certainly made a difference, as well as getting any tool I asked for (ah, I was among other things cleaning up after another consultant to this company abjectly failed). Not sure how long I would have done it if that was an option (the NASA consulting contract was eliminated altogether when Clinton downsized NASA). The other one I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, and I quit in disgust after less than 2 months.
GVIrish 13y ago
Having the best developers in the world is useless if you have incompetent management. In this case, requirements were delivered extremely late, and they were still in flux up to a week before deployment. The system integrator went forward with only ONE WEEK of integration testing. There were 55 companies involved in this, not to mention all the state exchanges and other federal software systems that had to be integrated. Better developers would have made a positive impact, but nowhere near enough to make this project a success.

robomartin 13y ago

...and the website is not the worst part of the ACA ride we are now on. Part of me has been ignoring a lot of the chatter around the ACA as potential right wing fabricated drama. Too much noise and bilateral bullshit being thrown about these days. That was until a few days ago, when I would learn our insurance has both more than doubled in cost and is also scheduled for cancellation. Doubled and cancelled. All as a direct result of the ACA. Brilliant! To say this was shocking is an understatement. Our annual cost will go well past $15K. There's a tragedy of unintended consequences, side effects and direct effects, being played out in the background that hasn't completely come to the surface yet. We certainly can't be the last family to get news of this kind. That means in the coming months it is likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of additional individuals and families are going to receive these dreaded letters. Apparently hundreds of thousands already have. Last week was our turn. At one point this and other issues will be difficult to ignore. And they will dwarf the IT issues. The website, as much of a disaster as it is, is likely to pale in comparison to all of the other, non IT, issues. Some of what's happening is related to the incredible disconnect between Washington and technology. All you need to do is listen to some of these folks talk about the website issue to see how little they understand. I heard one senator say something akin to "they just have to re-enter a list of five million codes". In other words, the term "code" to some of these guys means "numbers" and that someone made a data entry error in copying "codes" into the website. BSS (Balaji Srinivasan) covered some of this in his excellent Startup School talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A A talk which, he comments, has been mutated into something far different from what he said by the modern equivalent of the "broken telephone" game. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619068 I agree very much with his suggestion that an "exit" is required. Not meaning that we ought to pull-up roots and go, but rather that the tech community ought to almost ignore the dinosaurs and go ahead and evolve a society more aligned to modern realities. In his talk he gives examples of various US cities that have been "exited" to some extent through technologies developed in the free market. To some extent, it's an Innovator's Dilemma kind of a problem. http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244 http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B... The only way to make step changes is to do it well outside of the organization looking after the status quo, because that's all they know and that's all they can focus on.

greenyoda 13y ago

"There are no easy fixes for the fact that a 30 year old mainframe can not handle thousands of simultaneous queries. And upgrading all the back-end systems is a bigger job than the web site itself. Some of those systems are still there because attempts to upgrade them failed in the past. Too much legacy software, too many other co-reliant systems, etc." 30 year old (1983) mainframes and databases were designed to handle large transaction loads. For example, airline reservation systems and banking systems were built on them. And upgrading a mainframe (at least an IBM mainframe) to a faster mainframe isn't such a daunting task, since all the code from 30 years ago (or even from the 1960s) is still object-code compatible with the new machines - you can make it run even if you've lost your source code. There's still lots of 30 year old (and older) Cobol code running on mainframes today. I agree that re-writing the 30 year old software would be hard, but simply getting it to run faster could probably be done just by spending money on the latest mainframes and disk drives. But if nobody ever did a load test on the site, they wouldn't have known that they had to do this. They probably just thought: "Oh, we have to write a web site that talks to a bunch of databases, how hard could that be?" (By the way, they could have written test code to do a load test on those legacy systems without even having a web site running. In retrospect, that's the first thing they should have done, and it would have shown them that their critical path wasn't the user interface.)

hga 13y ago
You make very good points about early load testing. Unfortunately, as detailed in so many places including the OP, the integrator, the government's CMS, clearly didn't have the expertise to realize this. E.g. any vaguely competent at software development organization knows you have to freeze the requirements well before the week before the launch, and not make major changes less than 2 months before (the heavy registration process instead of allowing window shopping).
GVIrish 13y ago
In theory you could at least improve the hardware the legacy systems is running on. In practice that may not have been anywhere near enough to ensure success. 1. In this case you would've had to start benchmarking the performance of the legacy systems early, far earlier than when they started development in March. If you determine that hardware upgrades are needed, then you'd need to initiate procurement and upgrade projects at one or more of these other agencies. Projects like that may not necessarily be quick to implement. Maybe the physical space can't accommodate new hardware. Maybe there isn't enough budget to do an upgrade like that. Maybe there aren't enough personnel resources to plan and implement an upgrade of that scale quickly. Maybe those organizations are just barely keeping their heads above water with the way those systems are currently functioning. Maybe they don't even have a handle on what their hardware configuration is. I know someone who worked at an agency where they had to start unplugging stuff to figure out what server did what. 2. This is all making the assumption that the data in those systems is correct and well-formed, and the business logic in those systems is free of bugs. Maybe you get the database schema and find out that A. It's out of date, B. There's no data dictionary, and C. There's 250k lines of business logic tied up in undocumented triggers. Good luck. Load testing might just be the tip of the iceberg in situations like this. But bottom line is, if the people leading your project don't even think to start looking into this kind of stuff very early on, you might be screwed before you even started.

snowwrestler 13y ago

I think the easiest fix at this point is to simply design around the known delay in synchronizing all the 3rd party data calls. Have people enter their info, then show them a screen that says "your quote will be emailed to you in 24 hours." Then the integration system has 24 hours to retry any failed data pulls, match up all the data, and generate a quote.

hga 13y ago
Problems: An insistence on a heavy (throughtly validated) registration process. People want to have choices. Maybe they don't want to get insurance from company A. There are also monthly payment vs. deductible tradeoffs in the Bronze vs. Silver etc. plans. And some demand cost sharing after you've used up your deductible (I wouldn't really care if the plan had a 10 million dollar limit if I was expected to pay 20-30% of that...). ADDED: plus you must be able to see if your doctors are in a plan's network. Despite the "one size fits all" new minimum gold plated plan, there's still a lot of tradeoffs ... and then email isn't necessarily reliable enough for the response. I can't see them avoiding a "or check back on the site tomorrow..." option.

pessimizer 13y ago

The real problem is with the weird indirection of the US government providing payment to doctors/hospitals/pharma through subsidies, tax breaks, and tax penalties granted to or extracted from citizens that can only be spent at private insurance companies or mitigated by spending at private insurance companies who then, in turn, pay for your healthcare. The sheer complexity of this rent-seeking indirection makes keeping track of the millions of distinct participant-instances that can play out in hundreds of different ways, involving integrating tens of massive legacy systems with new, flexible business logic (for a law in flux), impractical. With single-payer, they could have scrapped the vast majority of this complexity.

fauigerzigerk 13y ago

Focusing on the performance or scalability of these ancient backend systems is beside the point. It's simply not a great idea to connect a significant number of backend systems run by different organizations in one synchronous online transaction. The overall probability of failure may simply be too high, irrespective of any scalability issues.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

The answer is that you can't structure the transaction as a realtime query. You have to structure it as something that's sent and gives you a ticket, and the reply associated with that ticket will come back in its own time. Stick the processing pipeline in Twitter Storm (which can retry any step until the whole pipeline is done) and structure the requests as nearly-idempotent (so a repeated reply is harmless, and the first arrival associated with the ticket wins). Finally, you have an "inbox" where people can wait for and see their answer, with optional SMS and email notification.

hga 13y ago
Interesting, but at some point people have to be shown a selection of offerings. That selection must allow seeing if your doctors are in the network. Your suggestion would allow for that, but not I sense in the "instant gratification" way we're used to dealing with web sites. I.e. "thanks for your input, wait for SMS/email/N hours till you log in again for the next step". BTW, I've read it's a 30 step process. Not all will require "take a ticket and wait to be called", but more than 1 or 2 I suspect.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  Well, they aren't getting instant gratification now, are they? I suspect a lot could be cached - that is you take a list of questions up front, what comes back from the "ticket reply" contains any further questions you'd need to answer and enough canned data to process the replies immediately. So you wouldn't need to take a ticket more than once. But even if you did need to, at least it would be something people could fill in and walk away from. They wouldn't be kept around, drumming their fingers and worrying about being late to work.
  - hga 13y ago
    "Well, they aren't getting instant gratification now, are they?" Indeed! But I was referring to the initial architecture of the site. E.g. the March objective, “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” expressed by Henry Chao, CMS CIO, who in theory should have been in the front lines. Sigh, I bet he was, knew what was coming but didn't have the authority to make it work, or as you implicitly suggest, down-grade the architecture/expectations into something that might possibly work in the time left. And then there's the last minute (well, month) change to requiring a heavy duty, validated up the wazoo registration before doing anything. Doubt they could have made that work in less than 2 months ... maybe. This was needed, but at lower transaction rates, e.g. otherwise window shopping would allow a lot of people to see they couldn't get a better deal through the exchange (e.g. no subsidies for you, which only the federal system is allowed to calculate). Suppose prior to that they arranged for "X rate of idempotent reads" with e.g. the IRS, and now they need a 10/100/1000X rate, meaning they should have cached everything that doesn't change quickly. Almost certainly too late to do it by then. My, my, years from now this is going to be one of the most significant case studies in project development.

digikata 13y ago

"Failure isn’t rare for government IT projects – it’s the norm. Over 90% of them fail to deliver on time" Is this really much different than the success rate of startup culture where VC's count themselves successful if 10% of their investments yield a return? The startup environment has the "success rate advantage" that if the venture really isn't getting traction, you can walk away from it, or change directions a do something related, but not your original objective. Government projects like the healthcare exchange don't have that degree of freedom - if they go down the wrong track, the only choice is put in more resources until it's back on track. Giving up or changing objectives isn't a decision under the control of the project - it's a legislative or budgetary question.

narrator 13y ago

Only supports 200 simultaneous transactions ay? Well just put a big ol' queue on the front of it with a hard thread limit and tell people they'll get an email when it's ready.

hga 13y ago
But it crashed at 200 in the testing the week before launch.... For all we know it crashed at 2 "truly simultaneous" attempts. I've watched more than one project run beautifully until they attempted a second simultaneous logged in user, which is not quite the same thing, but....

dreamdu5t 13y ago

The problem is government contracting. CGI will continue to get contracts. The problem is a system where if you don't deliver you get paid millions of dollars and still get jobs.

erichocean 13y ago

As an aside, when I hear about the problems they're having understanding the legacy data formats, it makes me wonder how far you could get with a high-powered, big data NLP system to "parse" the data. Sort of like how Google translate works. There are rules, after all, they're just not written down. Why not let the computer figure them out, with continuous training from people until the computer's accuracy is high enough? I suspect instead they tried to write parsers and trusted "the spec", which was never even right the day it was written down. :)

USNetizen 13y ago

The issue I see here is the author of this article has marginal experience with federal contracting. "The people who wrote the code for these systems are long gone...they are prone to transaction timeouts" ... wrong, wrong and wrong. There are plenty of coders still around maintaining these systems, even with the obscure technologies like MUMPS and all and they are running on rather robust hardware in huge datacenters. Second of all, the government should NEVER outsource integration - the systems integrator requires an authority to manage other contractors that only the government is capable of holding.

hga 13y ago
Are you really sure about your first point? I have a state government counterexample here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622223 As for the second, whatever might be right, we've been told that only the Pentagon has retained that ability for "medium sized" weapons projects. Anyone know anything to the contrary?

natural219 13y ago

"Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. As suggested by the above redesigns of the train timetable, bookstore, and movie listings, many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic." "Interaction considered harmful", by Bret Victor http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/