Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol

Posted by Soulskill on from the lords-of-cobol-hear-my-prayers dept.

MrMetlHed writes "A portion of this Reuters article about the Pentagon's inability to manage paying soldiers properly mentions that their payroll program has 'seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated.' It goes on to mention that the documentation has been lost, and no one really knows how to update it well. In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful."

39 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Cobol is self-documenting by mveloso · · Score: 5, Funny

    But - but - cobol is supposed to be self-documenting!

    1. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      But - but - cobol is supposed to be self-documenting!

      TL;DR

    2. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by Avidiax · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The claim that the documentation "vanished" seems bogus. Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.

    3. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Normal staff turnover and one building move would probably stand a good chance of taking care of it.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    4. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by TheCaptain · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point, but I doubt it was maintained very well by the people who edited that codebase over the decades.

      I also doubt they fired any of them unless they were contractors...you have no idea how ugly the federal workers union is about things like this. They almost can't lose their jobs through incompetence or anything else. Which brings me to the problem...the people who wrote it probably wrote half-assed spaghetti code, didn't document it well, and then died off or retired. No one is learning cobol anymore, so you get what we've got right here.

      Plus...trying to replace any system in the government or military is an extremely painful exercise that probably fails more often than it succeeds. Between the people you need to deal with, and the policies you need to dance around...it's almost impossible to stand a new system up. (Unless you have someone in a high place that really gets it, and champions the hell out of it...and even then, it's iffy.)

      I was a defense contractor for 4 or 5 years. It was quite a few years ago now. Left that behind, and I don't miss it.

    5. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by interval1066 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.

      Being the spouse of some one who works for a Gov. entity (her) AND being in IT (me), its far more likely that the the engineers who created the system(s) have long since retired. Fed workers rarely get 'fired'. And interestingly its more likely that the system was documented to a much higher degree than you would think; there are entire fed. departments devoted to documenting things and creating requirements documents. The problem is once the process is documented and archived, those same sad COBOL systems are used to process the records that describe the location of the documentation

      --
      Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
    6. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by plover · · Score: 3, Funny

      The claim that the documentation "vanished" seems bogus. Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.

      I think the truth is probably much simpler than that. Someone dropped the card deck containing the documentation, and they never managed to sort it back into the right order.

      --
      John
    7. Re:COBOL is self-documenting by ebno-10db · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but every line is documented the same way, "don't touch this because I don't know what it does but sometimes it works".

    8. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by budgenator · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well the source code is usually fairly legible, but at 7 million lines the spaghetti factor is likely pretty high.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    9. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by Ashenkase · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful.

      Translation: the pimps deployed highly effective counter measures to shock and awe the client, the result was a resounding victory of "extended" contracts!

    10. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Seven million lines of COBOL might only be a short sorting routine.

    11. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Insightful

      but it has the advantage of being quite easily maintained.

      Ahhhhh...no. COBOL has a GOTO. Legacy COBOL has a tendency to use the GOTO a lot. In legacy COBOL, all the variables are global (although you did at least have to declare them all). These things do not make for easily maintained code.

    12. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by budgenator · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We did flowcharts in Basic and Fortran, but COBOL was IPO charts (Input, Process, Output) and module diagrams for us; oh we did psudeocode of the modules, psuedocoding COBOL is really tough because cobol is so wordy.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    13. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Normal staff turnover in the military is 2 years on an assignment. People come in knowing next to nothing, spend two years learning 80% of what the previous incument knew and then move on. It doesn't take many cycles of that before all useful knowledge is lost.

    14. Re: Cobol is self-documenting by Mabhatter · · Score: 3, Funny

      Those tapes got wiped when the magnetic alien was stored too close.

    15. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 3, Funny

      Have you seen Cobol? It takes several hundred lines to write a "Hello World" program. 7 million lines of Cobol can probably be replaced by 70 lines of Perl (at the expense of any possibility of anyone ever reading it).

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    16. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by S1ngularity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      exactly how much of it is actually active?

      For every line of active duty Cobol code, there are seven support lines behind the front.

    17. Re:Cobol is self-documenting by kmoser · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well the source code is usually fairly legible, but at 7 million lines the spaghetti factor is likely pretty high.

      You assume the source code was still available.

  2. Typical government efficiency... by intermodal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    a billion dollars to replace an antiquated program and the project fails. This is why our military is the most expensive in the world, and why I've argued for years that comparing military spending between nations is only apples to apples if each nation is competently spending what they are given.

    --
    In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
    1. Re:Typical government efficiency... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I've seen this happen with lots of "let's replace this antiquated software" projects. There's alot of trust put into hiring someone to do this properly. Usually the people writing the check don't know enough about software architecture or requirements gathering to foresee that the contractor is going about it the wrong way and dooming the project to failure. Or administration that isn't open to the concepts that must be embraced to move from paperless to electronic, etc. So many ways for something like this to fail terribly. Only time I've seen it succeed is a combination of competent leadership of the software development combined with the administration trusting the judgement of the software developer when it advises on process changes that will need to be implemented. Rarely do you get both of these things together, and when you are missing one then it's a disaster.

    2. Re:Typical government efficiency... by ebno-10db · · Score: 4, Insightful

      defense spending as a portion of GDP has fallen from about 38% of GDP in 1945 to about 4-5% today

      Comparing current spending to WWII spending is either disingenuous or just plain silly.

    3. Re:Typical government efficiency... by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Added to this, people often have the misconception that just because something is "old" it is less complex than the current requirements. In reality, all that COBOL was written to perform the same function on severely limited hardware that they now want to accomplish on a simple server system -- and I bet the data and processing requirements both then and now are astronomical. The end result is that whoever is doing the new system is likely pitting themselves against whatever the brightest minds of yesteryear were able to produce, and it won't be simple. That old system had time to be fine tuned, and the protocol built up over the years is designed around the precise quirks created by the system. Thus, the entire architecture and ALL related protocol has to be re-examined prior to architecting a replacement system -- and I doubt the winning bidder was even asked to bid on that, especially in a military organization.

    4. Re:Typical government efficiency... by pwizard2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If we didn't interfere in other countries' business, so many people around the world wouldn't hate us and we would have no use for such a large military.

      --
      "It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
    5. Re:Typical government efficiency... by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm not sure where you got your numbers from, but you may have a couple of items swapped.

      In 2012, the US federal government spent $3.56 trillion dollars, with revenues of $2.44 trillion, and a deficit of $1.12 trillion.

      Entitlement spending was 61.9%, and defense spending was 18.7% (~ $677 billion).

      You can find that data here: Federal Spending by the Numbers - 2012

      You can see the long term trend of defense versus entitlement spending here.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    6. Re:Typical government efficiency... by dan_barrett · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I've maintained legacy payroll software (Oracle RPT, predates PL/SQL) and have been marginally involved in migrating clients to the new shiny payroll system. Generally it fails where the client wants the new system to behave exactly like the old system.

      The new system usually can handle the required business rules (or it's not too much work to make this happen) but all the processes around those rules are different. eg the new system needs to generate report RW200 to lineprinter 6, daily at 6PM and must be formatted just so (no one reads the first 1000 pages, but the summary page is critical to some obscure business process.)

      So, the new system has to print unformatted ASCII to a serial line printer, in an obscure way, on nonstandard paper, that's hard to replicate in a modern report writer. Never mind the already written, laser printed, on-demand reports (or emailed, or exported to excel or whatever) have the same information - it's NOT THE SAME - our users will be confused so it MUST BE CHANGED!.

      Rinse and repeat for basically everything else in your system and you've heavily modified your new system to behave just like your old payroll system (and killed any performance improvements, worked out all the bugs etc again). because it's so heavily modified you're basically on a unique version of the new system that only certain programmers really understand. Ant they're going to retire / leave because the project was so shit to work on.

      Add the usual government oversight/waste and you've blown a billion dollars. (that's impressive though, I have to say.)

    7. Re:Typical government efficiency... by AndrewLarge · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is less of a "government efficiency" issue than it is a "contracting" issue.

      Imagine you have a gigantic system like this that you need to replace. So you want to hire someone to build the replacement. You can't just go give $1B to company X and say "I'll see you in five years when you've built me a new pay system" - the taxpayers (and their representatives) would never go for that. Instead, you first go build a set of requirements that such a system must meet and then you award the contract to build the system to the company that convinces you that (a) they'll build the system that best meets those requirements and (b) they'll do so in a cost-competitive way (if not cheapest, then close to cheapest).

      Therein lies the crux of the problem - building large complex software systems over multiple years "to spec". In short, it can't really be done:

      • 1. You won't get the requirements right. At best, if you spend a ton of money, you'll get a decent set of requirements, for some narrow segment of your user base, that is appropriate for the state of the world at contract award. But they'll be woefully out of date by the time the system is actually built. More often, you won't pay enough money and you'll get an RFP that is 50%+ "cut and paste" from previous RFPs, and has only a passing resemblance to what is really needed.
      • 2. Managing a multi-year software development project is tough enough when you're the one building it. It is many times more difficult to try and look over a contractor's shoulder and make sure that they are (a) meeting requirements, (b) meeting schedule, and (c) not wasting (or stealing) money. This is even more difficult when you have thousands of crappy nonsensical or ambiguous requirements (the norm for such large systems).
      • 3. Even if you get decent requirements and decent/lucky contract management, you still have huge product and engineering hurdles that don't often show themselves until you get the software in the hands of real users. And (more often as not) find out that it doesn't work for them.

      I've only ever seen one model work successfully (in my time in the USAF and as a contractor):

      • 1. Put organic (e.g., military or civil service, not contractor) resources in charge of the system development.
      • 2. Don't try to spec and build the system as a whole unit. Instead, start with something small and easily defined and then work *directly* with end users to evolve and enhance the system over multiple years. At some point in the evolution of the system (neither the beginning nor the end), you make the call that the system is functional and stable enough to deploy.
      • 3. Use contractors as labor, project-managed by your organic resources. This tends to mean fairly integrated teams (organic and contractor) and a different sort of contract vehicle. It also means that swapping contractors out is actually feasible and doesn't cause the failure of the entire project.

      The above system works beautifully. And Congress, contractors, and contracting agencies within the military hate it. Which is probably why it isn't done more often.

    8. Re:Typical government efficiency... by jbohumil · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You totally get it. It takes strong leadership to tell the business units that they must conform their procedures to the new system and it will be installed as is. That is the way to succeed. Then once it's in you can start opening it up.

  3. Everyone's pay get screwed up by alen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Army in the 90's
    Everyone's pay gets screwed up at least once, then. Uncle Sam takes it back

    Mostly minor things like an allowance like jump pay being paid while not on jump status

  4. Corruption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful

    Sounds like corruption. If you can't wrangle up a team of coders and project managers with a billion dollar carrot, then there is something terribly internally wrong with your process.

  5. How did the military pay during WW2? by Spy+Handler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They had way more soldiers back then today, and payroll did not seem to be a problem. Maybe the Pentagon should go back to using whatever system they had back then.

  6. now there are multitude of pay levels. by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is basic pay, plus “entitlements” for everything from serving in a combat zone to housing allowances to re-enlistment bonuses. An individual’s pay can change several times in a day.

    likely the old software can't deal with all of that to well.

    http://www.informationweek.com/government/state-local/outdated-it-blocks-california-payroll-or/225702383

  7. Can't read the article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I tried to read the article, but it was written in English - a decades-old language.

  8. 4.8 LOC per person by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The code base is so large that its ~4.8 lines per active duty US military person. The code would be shorter if it was nothing but one line per person that prints how much to pay. You might argue that this would have maintenance issues, but automated porting of it would be trivial, and for the $billion they spent try to replace it, you could pay almost $1000 per print statement to keep it updated.

  9. Re:Redundant by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Funny

    Also, seven million lines of COBOL is about what it takes to write a Sudoku solver in COBOL.

  10. Cobol really is self-documenting by techno-vampire · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point,

    Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code." One of the reasons that COBOL is such a verbose language is that it was designed so that bean counters with no programming experience could audit the source code and understand it well enough to make sure that nobody was stealing anything. Not only that, it's rare that COBOL code actually needs any comments because the variable names are long enough that you shouldn't ever have to guess what any of them are used for or what's being done with/to them.

    As far as spaghetti code goes, that can be a problem, especially in very old code, from before such things as structured programming were conceived. And, there's even a statement, "ALTER," which allows you to create self-modifying code, although even back in the '80s when I learned it in school, we were warned never to use it.

    --
    Good, inexpensive web hosting
    1. Re:Cobol really is self-documenting by Capsaicin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code."

      While it's true that COBOL is meant to be self documenting, there is, in a 7 million line project, a difference between understanding any particular section of code and being able to comprehend the entire structure of the project. If that structure is undocumented, you will have a lot of reading before you grasp the program globally. Apparently the "failures" that were being experienced were not leading the maintainers to the appropriate sections of code and such a global understanding had become necessary.

      I know it breaks one of the cardinal rules of software development, but if you have a cool billion to throw at the problem and the existing mess cannot be fathomed, perhaps starting afresh is an idea ...

      --
      Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
    2. Re:Cobol really is self-documenting by techno-vampire · · Score: 3, Insightful

      COMPUTE t1(i1) = (t2(i2) ** 3) / (t3(i1) * 2 + 1);

      Yes, except that you'd have a period at the end, not a semicolon. (This is why statements in COBOL are referred to as "sentences.") However, if you did try something like that in a shop where the bean counters were auditing your code, they'd probably reject it for lack of clarity and insist that you gave that variable a more meaningful name. If you really want to, you can obfuscate code written in any language, but it's probably harder to get away with in COBOL than in most other languages.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
  11. Typical Government Efficiency by kartaron · · Score: 3, Informative

    For 33 years the government has been trying to replace the 60 year old air traffic control systems. Three different systems have been tried. The first was a complete write off, meant to be an IBM designed Unix based system, it went overdue by years and billions and was killed off in 1994. http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Processes/The-Ugly-History-of-Tool-Development-at-the-FAA/ The Second named CARTS began in 1996, meant to be a replacement for the aging radar systems the program did replace the older systems in some airports, but again the program was killed for cost overruns and stalled production. http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/tracon-air-traffic-control-modernization-faces-prospect-more-schedule-cost/2013-06-02 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-31/air-traffic-upgrade-over-budget-facing-delays-report.html In 2003 they revived the project with compartmentalized implementations of an integrated system in order to see short term improvements. The first system, a replacement for CARTS renamed STARS) went in in 2012 and it is costing 60% more than expected, with the remaining systems set to be developed and implemented over the next 13 years. The next system to be implemented, ERAM, is already overdue by 4 years, over budget, and according to FAA reports, subject to critical failures and instability. http://www.airtrafficmanagement.net/2013/06/nextgen-over-budget-delays-certain-report/http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/eram-continues-undergo-critical-failures/2012-10-02 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportation_System

  12. Re:Not to shocked by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are correct. And wrong. According to the Reuters article, there were more than 15,000 requirements changes during the lifetime of the project. So you had precisely the right idea. You just underestimated the ability of a bureaucracy to fight back. By an order of magnitude.

    And that's what it was, too. Make no mistake, the project failed because a successful software system would reduce the headcount of the DFAS dramatically. That couldn't be allowed to happen, so it was sabotaged by eternal feature creep.

    And of course, they started with PeopleSoft, and there's no organization better at absorbing all available money for no return besides the DOD itself. Talk about a match made in hell...