Why I Won’t Bid On Government Work
Lambert has a New York Times story on the ACA web site and its problems. It is essentially a typical government IT SNAFU: 7 change orders in the 10 months before the launch, and a delay in providing specifications to the programmers.
This thing should have been finished on July 1st at the absolute latest for an October 1st launch, and that is really three months short of good practice for major projects. It takes time to test big systems. I would have wanted a minimum of a thousand people who weren’t IT professionals banging on the project to catch the most obvious of errors. I can almost guarantee that anything that might be called testing was done by the people who wrote the code, which is a terrible idea if you are looking for bugs.
This system was supposed to interface with other Federal systems to verify some of the input, but when it was launched the government was in shutdown, so some of those systems may have been off-line.
Originally this was supposed to be the portal to 50 state systems that would actually process the information and provide the user with options, but about two dozen Republican controlled states refused to create exchanges.
The Medicare site is really straight-forward and a mature site. If they had permitted people to buy into Medicare, this would have been a lot easier, with a lot less drama.
3 comments
I got my start doing a contract job for a government contractor for a project that had to be done by the beginning of the school year (hard deadline set in law to a spec that had been released only three months prior due to a lawsuit and other mess), so I’ve been in these programmers’ shoes before. All you can do is hack together something as fast as caffeine can get you there to meet the deadline laid down in the law, and then spend the next few months fixing it to actually work right. It sucks, but so it goes. My guess is that within the next couple of weeks they’ll get it hacked together enough to actually work most of the time, and then a team of programmers is going to go get smashed in a bar.
California’s web site had some troubles too but nothing like the national web site. Its biggest problem was reaching the national hub to validate information. As a result last weekend they did an update so that it just gathers the information and doesn’t try to validate any of it against the national databases. They’ll batch process that at some later time, they have up to December 15 to do so after all.
Probably half my contracting work was government contracts, sometimes federal, sometimes state. The problems I faced, especially at the federal level, were mostly due to an almost complete lack of understanding of the development process on the part of the managers. Change orders continued falling on my desk right up to the week of rollout, and I don’t mean just bug fixes: some of them were new feature requests that had to be coded more-or-less from scratch because somebody had a bright idea.
I do not much miss my work. I miss the income and the problem-solving, but I do not miss dealing with administrators who got the job by being somebody’s brother/sister-in-law.
My worst experience with this crap was sitting in front of my computer listening to a meeting on a headset the day before the sucker was supposed to roll out. They were discussing changes they wanted in a program that they had had for over three months. Three months after it had been agreed that the software was bug-free and met all of the requirements, they decided to have a meeting to make changes.
Fortunately the changes were cosmetic, and they got billed a hell of a price for those changes, but that was 24 hours I would never get back. The only positive, other than the money, is that I found out which of the guys I worked with on the contract wrote decent commented code.
I was making changes, compiling the code, and giving a copy to their courier to take to the meeting while it was going on to approve of the changes.
If they had changed anything that affected the parameters passed to the backend I would have probably unmuted my phone and said some very uncomplimentary things about the heritage of everyone at the meeting.
Fortunately the people acting as couriers were users, so I could make sure the changes didn’t screw things up for them. The users were happy with the product that was delivered, but then management got involved because of the cost of the project.
At some point you get too old to put up with this garbage.