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What Developers Can Learn From Healthcare.gov
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.'"
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd have a hard time believing that the servers have been this consistently overwhelmed with traffic. A more likely explanation is that a poorly designed system was patched together from components hastily built from a thousand different vendors. The web-app equivalent of a diesel engine held together with duct-tape and baling wire was then rolled out without any real testing.
The only time, "Good enough for government work," has ever escaped my lips was when I was confronted with a marginally functional mess of spaghetti code.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Why would you want to do this? If you had an income that fluctuated each year, would you not save in the good years so you could maintain a reasonable quality of lifestyle in the barren years? Or would you downsize your house and sell your car every other year as your income fluctuated.
Balancing the budget is not the challenge. The real challenge is finding a government that can save when the going is good, and convincing the US electorate of the need for a rainy-day fund, rather than giving it all back and more in tax breaks.