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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.'"
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.".
Having worked in government offices, I can tell you this is the real problem.
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.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
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.
They're using their grammar skills there.