Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google To Help Fix Healthcare.gov

wjcofkc writes "The United States Government has officially called in the calvary over the problems with Healthcare.gov. Tech titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google have been tapped to join the effort to fix the website that went live a month ago, only to quickly roll over and die. While a tech surge of engineers to fix such a complex problem is arguably not the greatest idea, if you're going to do so, you might as well bring in the big guns. The question is: can they make the end of November deadline?"

Comments

Vermont's Site is Toast

[Cornwallis]

Our Gov is finally "out of patience" with Vermont's site (built by the same CGI that did such a bang up job on the Fed system: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20131031/NEWS03/310310034/Governor-Peter-Shumlin-Web-woes-prompt-changes-to-Vermont-health-reform

Re:Why not IBM

[BasilBrush]

IBM certainly made sure the Nazi's CRM system worked right.

Re:Amazon

[Ralph Wiggam]

Prices and availability vary hugely for the same insurance plan for different people. Amazon has no way of handling that.

Re:And...

[the eric conspiracy]

It's not 600 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/?wprss=rss_politics

Re:Answer: No.

[kimvette]

> True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.

You are assuming that there is a detailed (and accurate) functional spec, design spec, and that the code is organized and well-documented - and that it is architected in such a manner that throwing more engineers at it will actually fix the problem. More often than not, that is not the case.