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The FBI Software Upgrade That Wasn't
Davemania writes "Washington Post reports that the FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed. The 170 million dollar Virtual case File system, the agency's second attempt to go paperless is reported to be useless. The finger seems to be pointing at the FBI leadership, greedy contractors and bad software management." From the article: "It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi, now the FBI's technology chief, asked about the error rate. Software problem reports, or SPRs, numbered in the hundreds, Azmi recalled in an interview. The problems were multiplying as engineers continued to run tests. Scores of basic functions had yet to be analyzed. 'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
If the anybody can screw up a big project like that it is the government. If it was 170 million of somebody's own money I think that it would have been done a lot better but since it is only the taxpayers money they seem to really mess things up. Perhaps this is one of the many reason we should limit the federal govt to their proper role as given in the Constitution.
Personally, I'd prefer the FBI not go paperless. Because (a) paper trails are nice in investigations and such (y'know, when the FBI finally goes up against the Supreme Court) and (b) stuff that doesn't have a hardcopy tends to get lost more often than physical objects...especially embarassing things...especially by government agencies.
Yes. I'm slightly paranoid.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
'A month before delivery,' Professor Knuth said looking up through his spectacles 'you can start implementing it if your correctness proofs are complete.'"
Ha! Welcome to the real world, guys.
They should have just started by picking a decent directory structure for the documents and then hooking up a decent search engine like the Google Appliance. Then the users could simply use web browsers instead of a weak, buggy, and expensive custom application.
Non CS people who commission custom software development often have no clue how expensive their ego driven non-standard features can be.
That quote was just too funny. In any huge huge huge project the state of play a month before is usually going through the thousands of trouble reports, deciding which features you will turn off so you can ge the release out, figuring out work arounds for the rest of them, discovering that the analysis was flawed on some functions and of course by now you ditched many other features because the analysis was not done at all. And yes you change a few icon colors to keep key users happy and get your sign-off. This is for a successful 1.0 implementation.
that's why government contractors that do this kinda shit (fail to deliver product) should be required to return all the money to the government, and if they don't they can rot in jail and the government will SEIZE their assets
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Wow... I have never, ever seen a software product that wasn't working on QA bug reports right up to the minute the gold disc is burned. And afterwards, of course, working on all the pre-release bugs that had been classified as 'known issues'.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
It would be nice if, sometimes, large organizations realized that applying computers to solving the problems of a paper trail is going to cause many many problems before any benefits are seen. In working with my university, I've seen time and again the tendency of higher-ups to see computers as a panacea to any/all problems an office might confront in keeping records on things.
For example, our housing lottery system was, until this past year, an in-person process where people were assigned times, showed up, claimed rooms, and was a fair system that worked. Then, the university got all fancy pants and replaced that lottery with this unbelievably crappy system called Residential Management System. To use: kill ad blocker, only use it in IE for Windows, ensure javascript settings are correct, and then wait until the clock allows you into the online lottery system. Attempt to use a non-intuitive UI that is completely new because you couldn't look at it before while time ticks away and other people claim the rooms you wanted. Even though I got the room I wanted, the experience was horrifyingly bad.
For these large organizations, I think less can be more. Keep your paper trail, but create a highly efficient system for digitizing documents. That way, you start to have some advantages of computers (search, organization, cross-referencing) without the liability of a completely paperless system. From here, you can slowly make a transition from leaning on paper to leaning on machines. But that would be the sane way of doing things, and we're talking about a governement organization here.
The new project is even worse than the old. No software, with the possible exception of truly safety-critical stuff like missle-control or nuclear power plants, needs to cost $425 million and take four years. You could have a custom OS written in pure assembly for a quarter of that!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
We've learned this over and over again at my company. The likelihood of scrapping the whole thing because you've got nothing is logarithmic to the cost. That is, the more the costs go up, the more likely you scrap the whole thing.
The project has to be bitten in chunks. Lay out the functionality, and then start implementing it one small piece at a time, integrating as you go along. The Big Bang approach is always doomed to failure, or explosive costs, especially when you get to the reality that to deploy you need to shut down the business for two weeks to manage the data conversion. Lot's of small $1 million projects are more likely to succeed and be at budget then one big $20 million project.
This isn't news. It's the whole momentum behind a lot of modern development techniques such as Agile, or architectural such as SOA.
There's also a corrolary that any project involving a big consulting company like EDS, CSC, Anderson(or whatever the hell their name isnow), etc. is more than likely going to cost double what it should.
If the specifications for the system were imprecise or constantly changing (as often happens), that would limit the ability of ANY software developer to create a stable functional system on time and within budget.
I'm not going to criticise the folks who were trying to implement the system until I know a lot more about the actual conditions in which they were trying to work...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Heck, give me half that--$85 million--and I'll develop the friggin' system myself.
/rant
You'd probably think so, but I bet after the first few months of totally contradictory change requests, specification creep, and an utter lack of hard-and-fast acceptance criteria, that you'd throw up your hands, too.
You can blame the contractors all you want, but I've worked on a bunch of projects like this, and they almost always fail not because the developers weren't good or didn't know their stuff, but because there wasn't somebody on the client side who had the political (internal/office-politics, not Democrats/Republicans politics, although within the USG they're often related) capital to get all the little fiefdoms that exist inside a big organization and sit them down and say "Okay, Fuckheads: this is the system we're going to be using, this is how it's going to work, and you will use it."
Projects like this fail when you let every Tom, Dick and Harry start pushing features into it. I've seen situations where software is in the final stages of testing, and somebody decides that it would be fun to bring down the Big Boss to show them where all these millions of dollars have been spent. And the Boss will come down and take one look at the software, and immediately demand that something get changed. Often I don't think that they really care about what they're demanding, they just want to show off that they have the power to change shit, so they do.
It's stuff like that which pushes projects into failure, even if they look dead simple on paper. The problem isn't a software-engineering one, it's a customer-relations one. It's a problem of the people hiring the developers probably not having a good idea of what they wanted in software, and not having a single person in charge of it.
You can tell that happened with this FBI project, because it's obvious just from the summary that the CIO wasn't involved in the project throughout its lifecycle. He just seemingly walked in on it when it was a month away from deployment, at which point I'm sure everything was totally FUBAR. The way to have prevented this would have been to get somebody like that on board from the very beginning, who could have kicked ass and taken names and kept things under control.
Without good leadership on the client side, and a clear set of business processes, requirements, and acceptance criteria, it's not surprising that these large software projects fail as often as they do. However, as long as the failures are equally profitable to the development contracting companies as the successes, they have no problem taking on a contract even though they know the client is going to drive it into the ground and has no idea what they want.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Although this is true, it is also true that most programmers deliver crap looking, uncomfortable to use, half-assed interfaces if left to their own devices. I know I do...
The same is true of a lot of Open Source software. Fun to do, very powerful, but much of it does look unprofessional or at least unreasonably hard to use, except for other programmers who share the same mindset as the maker.
The tragedy is on one hand that the people who complain about the interface issues are themselves also totally untrained and unqualified to say what exactly needs to be changed, and on the other hand that of course a solid, great looking interface design should be made up front, in the design phase, by professionals. I don't think that ever happens.
But we programmers can start by looking a bit more critically at our own work. A bit. While bitching about those irritating users who think looking professional matters more than actual function. Right?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
You help me understand why the mainstream press is in such bad shape these days. Shoddy Lazy Journalism is accepted as standard industry practice.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.