The problem is that if you have a terrible customer holding the purse strings, no development methodology would save you. Maybe if CGI used an Agile process to

The problem is that if you have a terrible customer holding the purse strings, no development methodology would save you. Maybe if CGI used an Agile process to develop this, they could've at least gotten a good start even though the requirements were horribly late and were changing all the way up to launch. But we don't even know if they received enough requirements to start development before this year. We also don't know if the customer would've authorized them to start development before this year. Bad decisions and failings from the customer can doom projects like these very early in the process. And even if CGI had used Agile and gotten as much done as they could, if you didn't get all of the requirements in time to implement them, you still probably couldn't launch. Politically HHS probably would not agree to launch without certain functionality completed. In a sane project if you're getting big requirements changes late in the game you'd either push them to another release or you'd push back the release date. Neither happened and predictably, disaster ensued. Then there's the whole idiocy of allocating one week for full integration testing. Of course that test failed but again, no one sounded the alarm (at least not publicly).