GVIrish

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781.
by GVIrish 13y ago
It amazes me how often the Mythical Man Month situation comes up in government IT. Sometimes people even KNOW that adding developers to a late project won't work but they have to be seen as 'taking action' so they do it anyw
782.
by GVIrish 13y ago
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 r
783.
by GVIrish 13y ago
To me the question is, once the president learns of the incompetence of a subordinate, what action does he take? Does the president hold the subordinate accountable, and fire them? Or does the president just let them keep on bungling. Rum
784.
by GVIrish 13y ago
The reason Bush is blamed for Abu Gharaib is because guidance came from the White House that torture was authorized in order to gain intelligence. Very different than if some subordinates tortured people of their own accord. Healthcare.gov
785.
by GVIrish 13y ago
What evidence do you have that the administration had anything to do with shutting down monuments? Something like that is at the discretion of the director of a given federal agency. Now maybe the director of the National Park Service dec
786.
by GVIrish 13y ago
What it boils down to for me is that the best contractor in the world can't make up for the worst government decision makers. After a project goes down in flames the contractor can point to specific failings at the government level, b
787.
by GVIrish 13y ago
No, I'm saying that in order to get the $15 million there has to be some sort of measures in place to make sure that people don't game the system. If you just give them $15 million with no strings attached, they might decide to d
788.
by GVIrish 13y ago
The integrator in this case was the government (CMS is a division of HHS), there's no getting around them as a single point of failure. 1. Having a basic idea of what the system will do is helpful, but in a system that has a lot of ver
789.
by GVIrish 13y ago
I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't distribute risk across many small projects, I'm saying that in this case doing so would not have helped you at all. If you had a competition to build a MVP of healthcare.gov wh
790.
by 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 t
791.
by 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" &quot
792.
by 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
793.
by GVIrish 13y ago
But what's stopping the majority of companies from just phoning it in and collecting free money? There would be only one winner so 19 of those companies are wasting their time anyway. If you really want companies to build prototypes,
794.
by GVIrish 13y ago
I don't see how giving 20 startups $15 million each would have led to success instead of failure. Even if you found a better company to do the implementation than CGI Federal, there were several enormous problems that no company would
795.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Big military projects have the additional problem of congressional interference. Congressmen regularly force military acquisitions that the military may not even want or need in order to funnel dollars to their home districts. So it might
796.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Open source would certainly help in terms of transparency and hopefully quality but bottom line is that it would not have saved this project. This project failed because of incompetent management. Requirements came in so late that developm
797.
by GVIrish 13y ago
You make a good point with flare guns, but I wouldn't be terribly afraid of them. Maybe someone on a plane could cause a lot of panic with flare gun but that's not much different that causing a fire with other means. You might b
798.
by GVIrish 13y ago
No one should be alarmed by a non-metal firearm until someone figures out how to make plastic bullets.
799.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Maybe you could still do an RTS, but cut it down to the bare bones of what it needs to have. Look at a game like Rymdkapsel. It's an RTS, but it cuts a ton of complexity out of the gameplay. By doing that, and focusing on some simple
800.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Definitely Unity. The forthcoming Unity 4.3 release will feature a new 2d game workflow that should make it easier to create simple games for people new to game development.
801.
by GVIrish 13y ago
With ACA you're still getting insurance from a private company and you can still sue them if you like.
802.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Well, some reports are that the requirements were changing until 1 week before launch, and that development didn't start until March of this year due to requirements delays. Just those two factors alone would doom just about any proje
803.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Can they elaborate on what actually did happen? If I were your friends I would be trying to contact news agencies with corrections if at all possible because this is shaping up to be the highest profile government IT failure in US history.
804.
by GVIrish 13y ago
That article misses the point by a country mile. Whether a software project is open source or not, poor project management will cause failure every time. Healthcare.gov had several significant challenges to deal with, from a hard deadline,
805.
by GVIrish 13y ago
The gaps I'm talking about would mean the winner lapped up to the top 5 or top 3. A truly unlimited ruleset would be financially ruinous as well. Only a few years ago top teams were spending $500 million or more a season and that was
806.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Eh, I wouldn't say Schumacher won against vastly superior Adrian Newey cars. Once Ferrari hit their stride in the Schumacher years they often beat McLaren by being far more reliable and robust. They also built up their advantage with
807.
by GVIrish 13y ago
If Red Bull is indeed cheating, Christian Horner would be a fool to come out and admit it. Cheating with traction control has been a problem in multiple forms of motorsport for a long time. It's difficult to prove, so by and large, te
808.
by GVIrish 13y ago
The number of fans that want to see the top technology vastly outnumber the number of fans that want to see the more limited tech. All things being equal, fans would like to see more advanced technology on the ractrack. But the reality i
809.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Exactly. The idea is that contractors can be fired for a poor job, but the reality is that it rarely happens. Federal employees are rarely held accountable for their failures so in turn they rarely hold contractors accountable. Maybe tha
810.
by GVIrish 13y ago
Where lack of accountability comes is the idea that contractors can be fired if they don't do a good job, whereas it is much more difficult to fire a full-time employee. So rather than solving that problem, most of the government&#x27

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