What Developers Can Learn From Healthcare.gov 267
An anonymous reader writes "Soured by his attempt to acquire a quote from healthcare.gov, James Turner compiled a short list of things developers can learn from the experience: 'The first highly visible component of the Affordable Health Care Act launched this week, in the form of the healthcare.gov site. Theoretically, it allows citizens, who live in any of the states that have chosen not to implement their own portal, to get quotes and sign up for coverage. I say theoretically because I've been trying to get a quote out of it since it launched on Tuesday, and I'm still trying. Every time I think I've gotten past the last glitch, a new one shows up further down the line. While it's easy to write it off as yet another example of how the government (under any administration) seems to be incapable of delivering large software projects, there are some specific lessons that developers can take away. 1) Load testing is your friend.'"
Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Informative)
I went through the site and found it responsive. Possibly the time of day and my western timezone had something to say about it, but had no issues.
Even CNN looks bad when something major happens and everyone hits them at once, despite humming along for months without any issues.
Can't 0wn a powered-off server (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:3, Informative)
It's up because they had a separately authorized source of funds.
Remember we haven't hit the debt limit yet, we hit the government budget limit.
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing shows up the sheer arbitrariness of a government shutdown than some sites like Healthcare.gov being up, and others being forced to shut down at extra expense when they could have just been left running (and the servers that are there just to tell you the site is shut down are still consuming power and bandwidth).
One more time, because some people clearly haven't read it or heard it: The Affordable Healthcare Act is not affected because it was fully funded. The budget Continuing Resolution is for things which are not already funded.
Stupid design (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Informative)
Because there are so many laws about making the government use contractors instead of hiring employees (because private sector is allegedly so much more efficient), damn near everything has to be contracted out. Then the contractors fail to deliver, they go over budget and come in way behind schedule. The government has no choice but to pay them and accept their useless work, again, due to more laws about "helping the private sector".
There's no way to fire a contractor or even to hold them to their original contract. They agreed to do something for a certain price? Too bad, they're going to sue the government and use those biased laws in order to deliver less than half of what they promised at more than 3 times the price they quoted and agreed to.
Re:What can they learn? (Score:2, Informative)
Not one god damned fucking thing.
Not true, I learned that the portal is as useful as a politician. Considering the failure to balance the budget, reining in of these arrogant bastards who declared war on the American people. Over time will one understand the uselessness of these politicians and their insurance industry written healthcare policies. These CONgressMEN are as bankrupt as the nation they supposedly lead.
Re:What can they learn (Score:5, Informative)
How about this one, hire an Indian firm to run a government level oracle database without actually testing it or including load-balancing and you're gonna have a bad time.
Blame your horrendous failure on user volume and then call it glitches and you're gonna have a bad time.
List of known issues in order of appearance:
01. security questions not loading.
02. security answers failing validation.
03. email validation tokens timing out instantly.
04. correct passwords failing
05. password reset emails not providing clickable link for reset
06. password reset link loads page which doesn't find the profile it just emailed to.
07. EIDM server crashing and throwing system down errors.
08. oracle server errors.
09. network gateway timeout errors.
10. oracle account manager loading towards public
All of this excluding the actual waiting pages for a website.
This is either gross incompetence or sabotage.
Re:What can they learn? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a challenge at all. Texas does it. We're required by our state constitution to have a balanced budget, and we only let our legislature meet for 150 days every other year. The result: once they are in session, they're working to hammer out the new budget and fix the real problems, instead of constantly being in session feeling the need to legislate something, messing things up, and wrecking the economy.
Yeah. They never feel the need to legislate something, right? Only work to fix the real problems? They'd never decide that they needed a bit of extra time to legislate something just because they felt the need, right?
I'll just leave this here for people who maybe aren't absolute morons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Davis_(politician)#2013_filibuster [wikipedia.org]
Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly what I have seen over the last couple of decades. Your comments seem to be directed at contracted projects, but I see ongoing federal contracts that hire minimum wage employees to replace skilled federal employees. The costs are more than the costs to hire federal employees and the corporation pockets a nice profit, but the services are substandard. Contractors are supposedly an overall cost savings because if the need for the work moves or disappears, there are no federal employees to move or RIF. The problem is that some of these contracts have been ongoing for decades, and are coming close to the length of a federal employee's entire career!
Federal contracts do NOT save money, but they do profit the corporations that donate to politicians' political campaigns.