So am I. As I noted last week on Twitter when the new launch date was announced, it’s based on when it has to be ready, from a political standpoint, not when it can be ready from a technical one. It’s not a case where you can get a baby in a month by putting nine women on the job. And in fact, it has a lot in common with October 1st in that regard.
[Update a while later]
Big-government project, big failure:
The 1960s space program, of course, is a classic example of big government doing something successfully: Promising to put men on the moon within a decade, and doing it. But there are others.
Not far from me is Norris Dam, the very first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was filled in 1936, less than three years after the Tennessee Valley Authority Act passed Congress. Note that it was not less than three years after construction started, but less than three years after the act creating the agency that built it passed Congress. Norris Dam worked, and it’s still there today, more than 70 years later.
The Obamacare website — which took longer to create — doesn’t work, and certainly won’t be around in 70 years. And if you think about it, it seems like the moon landing was one of the last times the federal government delivered a big successful program ahead of schedule. I can’t think of many others since.
Unlike Norris Dam, the Olmsted Dam and Locks on the Ohio River were authorized by Congress in 1988, but a quarter-century later the project is only half-done. It has also overrun its budget by a factor of four.
Meanwhile, most of the interesting stuff being done in outer space is being done by private companies. (In fact, President Obama’s space policy approach, which emphasizes private enterprise, is one of his greatest policy successes.)
As it’s gotten bigger the federal government appears to have gotten less competent. Apollo was a success on its own terms, but the big government policies that followed — the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs, the War On Cancer — have all been pretty much failures, sometimes disastrous ones.
And that was when people running the government weren’t as glaringly incompetent as the current circus of clowns.
At this stage of the game….huge, buggy software package………..the Mongolian Horde method rarely works.
They will have to be very lucky – the widespread problems will need to stem from one group of functions in order to get it debugged and tested by the end of November. If the bugs are sprinkled throughout the code then it’ll be a very tough job to get it done by 30 Nov. In the latter case fixing one bug usually generates others.
No Rand, this Web site cannot be saved — too many forum posters take extreme political positions and just snark at each other (ba doom, boom!).
The 500 million lines of code in Healthcare.gov are a Right-wing lie. There are only 423,775,221 and 44 hundredeths lines of code . . .
In case you are wondering, the 44/100’s of a line of code is the metric assigned to the one comment that appears on the entire codebase . . .
500 million lines of code? Seriously? If that’s even close to true, this system is even more FUBAR than I thought, and that’s saying a lot. Even if that’s an exaggeration by an order of magnitude, it’s still vastly too much.
This, along with the failure rate of other big government projects, shows how profoundly incompetent big government. The more complicated you make something, the more ways it can fail, and this metric applies to government projects, and government itself. This is a reason that goes beyond the fiscal for cutting back the size of government, a lot.
One little side effect of the code bloat; the “tech surge” will fail. You simply can’t bring in a new team to take over and fix something that complex; anyone who has ever tried to work on someone else’s code will understand why. So, they will probably end up rewriting it entirely – and thus try to get done in 4 weeks what they couldn’t do in almost four years.
The democrats are actually rather lucky that the website fiasco is happening, because it’s distracting from the far bigger fiasco of the rest of Obamacare.
Regarding any promises of how Obamacare will work;
“We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away.”
Remember that oft-repeated promise? I sure do. I remember it whenever I look at the cancellation letter I received thanks to Obamacare.
Barack Obama is a lying sack of maggot-infested bovine excrement.
By comparison: a Boeing 777 or a space shuttle use 5 million lines of code. It’s even bigger than Debian 5: http://www.alexmarchant.com/blog/2013/10/22/healthcare-dot-gov-lines-of-code-comparison.html
Thanks for that chart. It really puts it into perspective; healthcare.gov has more lines of code than everything else on the list combined. Even Facebook, which is enormous and does all sorts of tracking and interrelated stuff, is a tenth the size.
Has anything, ever, had half a billion lines of code before the Obamacare fiasco?
Has any program ever cost more than a dollar per line of code?
Yes. I was on the receiving end of a satellite operations program called Data Systems Modernization (DSM) back in the late 1980s. DSM was let as an $80 million open ended development effort including both software and hardware. When we finally began limited operations with DSM in 1988, DSM had grown to 10 million lines of code and the program cost had climbed to over $800 million and was still rising. Like I said, that included the hardware but IBM looked in their warehouses and architected the program around whatever they hadn’t managed to sell to customers like Series One processors and limited OS/370 systems. I don’t know the final cost or the cost per line of JOVIAL code but it was way over $1.
Actually, I’d wager that just about any mission essential (lives on the line) software ends up costing far more than $1 per line of code. While I don’t have any cost figures to back up the assertion, how much do you think companies like Boeing and Airbus spent to develop the fly-by-wire software for their airlines, or Lockheed spent (and is spending) for the F-22 and F-35 software?
It’s so good to know that Obama is one of us being just as angry. That’s really the most important thing. /sarc
The largest project I ever had to handle by myself was a bit over a million lines of code (attrition of the team left me the last man standing over a decade ago.) I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it used some of the tools being used today. 500 million can’t be a single code base. Which means, even if each part were perfect, the screw up could be all in the interfaces. More probable of course is that the ‘business rules’ themselves are contradictory… no amount of coding will fix that, but it can hide the fact pretty well. At some point they may be able to demonstrate something that seems to work… hosannas to follow… but under the covers will create data that is impossible to sort out. Obama coded and people folded.
The business rules problem is not the same as the economic ignorance problem although they are related.
If they didn’t know how to do a scalable app they should have contracted with somebody that had already demonstrated such, but that’s an entirely different issue.
With enough hacked up code (that by-passes most of the crap causing the problems) you might be able to make the site at least look functional long enough to get you through a press conference. It won’t work under any stress and it sure as hell won’t be maintainable, but it will be enough to convince the faithful (aka the WH press corps) that everything is OK. That narrative will last about a week before the system goes tango uniform again.
If, as Grand Fleet Admiral Gerrib claimed, Obamacare was a (Gerrib said free) market, then Healthcare.gov need only be a gateway identifying options (as Jay Carney claimed it essentially is today). A gateway doesn’t need even 5 million lines of code.
For an example of a government website that provides access to a market; here is what the Public Utility Commission of Texas set up to inform citizens of their energy retailer options: http://www.powertochoose.org/ If you live outside Texas and want to see how easy it is to see options, try 77002 (Houston Zip Code).
So why does Healthcare.gov need all this extra code?
If ever a quote was appropriate: “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“So why does Healthcare.gov need all this extra code?”
That 500 million lines of code may be just a made-up number, and we shouldn’t simply repeat it and stake our reputations on it.
Given the high levels of disinformation, i.e. spin, behind much of everything, it is hard to be certain what is happening with Healthcare.gov or with insurance applications beyond anecdotes, but when SNL starts making jokes about it, it suggests that it is hard to cover up that this thing simply isn’t working . . . Jim.
Whether it is 500 million or 500 thousand lines of code is really besides the point if this thing is broken and it persists in being broken.
That 500 million lines of code may be just a made-up number
True. That is a huge number, but this also is a huge project that is seeking to control a very significant portion of our economy. In my experience as a developer, three and a half years would have been an impossible timeline to meet if they were planning to have a fully functioning deployment. They should have pursued something similar to the IRS and their electronic filing program…start with a small set of federal forms and schedules, and over the subsequent years continue to add more forms and schedules to the program until virtually all tax returns are eligible for electronic filing. Then add integrations to other databases such as Social Security, child support, etc., to automate basic audits of deductions. Then integrate with the states to enable electronic filing of state returns. It took the IRS about 20 years to get where they are now, and in fact the system is so thoroughly adapted to computerized tax preparation and electronic filing that my guess is that your chances of being audited would be significantly diminished if you now file a paper return via US mail.
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Apparently Baghdad Jim can’t even find a way to put lipstick on this pig.
He’s just waiting for his talking points…the WH is a little flustered right now trying to find the right ones.
I was expecting BJ the Puppet to latch onto the Valerie Jarret lie/dissembling but it’s not flying too well.
I just came across this excellent article, Government is Magic:
Our modernity is style rather than substance. It’s Obama grinning. It’s the right font. It’s the right joke. It’s that sense that X knows what he’s doing because he presents it the right way. There’s nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It’s why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.
The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the “right things” not because they led to the right results, but because we had decided that they were the right things. There were many competent people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.
And we’re right back there today. The entire process of ObamaCare was the opposite of going from Point A to Point B. It was the least competent and efficient solution every step of the way. There was no reason to think that its website would be any better. The process that led to it being dumped on the American people was completely devoid of any notion of testing or outcomes. It was the right thing to do because… it was the right thing to do. It was cargo cult logic all the same. So was its website.
Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was “good”. Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.
RTWT
I guess he needs a copy the “The Mythical Man-Month”. The more people you add to a late project the later it will be delivered as supposed to. The reason is people-to-people communication costs.
If it is true that it really has 500 Million LOC the first things they need to do is put the hard disk with the source code in a black trash bag and send it to the nearest trash can possible. Then rewrite it again using 100x less lines of code.