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How Healthcare.gov Changed the Software Testing Conversation
An anonymous reader notes an article about how the tribulations of Healthcare.gov brought the idea of software testing into the public consciousness in a more detailed way than ever before. Quoting:
"Suddenly, Americans are sitting at their kitchen tables – in suburbs, in cities, on farms – and talking about quality issues with a website. The average American was given nightly tutorials on load testing and performance bottlenecks when the site first launched, then crumbled moments later. We talked about whether the requirements were well-defined and the project schedule reasonably laid out. We talked about who owns the decision to launch and whether they were keeping appropriate track of milestones and iterations. ... When the media went from talking about the issues in the website to the process used to build the website was when things really got interesting. This is when software testers stepped out of the cube farm behind the coffee station and into the public limelight. Who were these people – and were they incompetent or mistreated? Did the project leaders not allocate enough time for testing? Did they allocate time for testing but not time to react to the testing outcome? Did the testers run inadequate tests? Were there not enough testers? Did they not speak up about the issues? If they did, were they not forceful enough?"
Ya those damn testers, they just can't communicate the issues to management. Like that NASA engineer and the O-rings. Stop blaming the testers.
It is not really a question of testing. Parts of the software were missing or incomplete. You can't test what isn't there.
These same questions plague Battlefield 4
It does not sound to me as though known management tools were used. Did they sit down with the government personnel in charge, and present their approach, and what the site would look like (menus, flow, etc) when finished? Were there testable milestones, and a final presentation of working software? It sure doesn't sound like it.
I cannot imagine a worse job than to have worked on that project.. The ratio of "status update" meetings and management pud-pulls to useful work accomplished must have been damn close to infinity..
You haven't worked on my project.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
load testing and performance bottlenecks"
That's great but how about we teach the average American how to spot Europe on a map first.
Most of the Affordable Care Act has nothing to do with the web site. The site didn't have to implement those "2.8 million words of Obamacare regulations" as code: it only had to match patients up with insurance plans, which means interacting with dozens (hundreds?) of government and industry databases.
Some states, like California, managed to implement their sites without any of the problems of the federal exchange. The federal exchange mainly suffered from (1) being rushed, and (2) having to deal with a larger number of external systems than any single state exchange.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Performance and scaling should have been addressed in the design phase
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> I challenge anyone to create a website that conforms to such a huge number of rules -- some of them probably contradictory!
Sounds like any other regulatory burden. Are the things at Amazon FCC approved? Are they UL listed? Do they pass muster by the USDA?
All of that stuff is outside the scope of the website and it should be the case for Obamacare too.
Your kind of thinking is why it was such a disaster and why 3 guys managed to throw together a window shopping frontend with little effort.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Imagine being the QA inspector on a 1985 Jugo car. No matter what you say, the entire thing is a POS. The only question is whether you need your paycheck that badly. Politics and unrestrained corruption simply don't mix well with code.
One of the most insightful truths ever told to me:
It is always management's fault.
This goes right to the root of the tree, because by definition if the people further out couldn't get the job done or didn't have the right resources to do it, it was management's responsibility to fix those problems. The buck stops with the most senior managers on a project, whose only two choices are to explain what is needed to succeed and then do so if given those things, or to fail.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why? Is Europe's location somehow significant to average Americans?
And there is the proof of the OP's implied statement
Yes, yes, because every bridge the government builds falls down three or four times a day in the first couple of weeks after it's opened.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Conservatives constantly point out how excessive regulation makes doing business difficult. Well it makes things difficult on the government, too. Let's be fair.
Isn't that rather like saying "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have compassion on my client. By killing his parents he became an orphan."?
SQA as a red-headed stepchild has been an issue for many, many years. It's just that most troubles/failed software systems don't have the widespread public exposure that Healthcare.gov has; even the most brain-dead corporation would not have launched such an incomplete and bug-ridden system to a vast end-user bases.
Some years ago, I led a review of a late (4 yrs vs 2 yrs estimated) and very over-budget ($500M vs. $180M estimated) corporate software project. The core problems had everything to do with SQA, starting with the fact that there was no SQA organization; all testing was done on an ad hoc basis by individual teams and organizations. Adding to that problem was the fact that there was no coherent architecture. After 4 years and $500M, there were no systems that were ready to go into production. Far too common in industry and especially in government. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
A Swiss friend of mine visited DC. I live in So Mo. We chatted on the phone and he suggested we get together for lunch the next day. So, I agreed and told him the city in Virgina we could meet in after driving eleven hours.
They're no better with our geo than we are with theirs.
If you find out in testing that your architecture or design does not cut it, you are screwed. The only thing you can usually do is scrap the project and start again. Testing does only work for simple things like simple busiess logic and the like, where you know the characteristics very well beforehand. For anything that is a new design, the only thing that helps is very capable and experienced architects and designers that have a good change to get it right by intuition. This will be people that can do architecture, design and implementation and can do all three well. Not many of those exist, but there is no replacement for them. Those that think they can do things on the cheap without not only having this type of expert but also listening to them closely will fail. This can be observerd time and again and can alost be called a "well established industrial practice", because quite a few "managers" do not actually know that it can be done better. Funny thing, in other fields, you have chief enineers, architects and the like and the critical work is not given to people that are likely to fail. Only IT messess it up regularly, because talent and exerence is not respected.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem underlying the entire fiasco — and the less-impacting others like it (Amtrak, anyone?) — is that whatever the government does, is done poorly .
I realize that that's a right-wing meme, and it's rare for conservatives to change their minds based on the facts, but it's not true.
The military and Veterans Affairs medical centers give some of the best care in the world. I've read the studies that compare them to other centers around the world. They've got the data.
Ronald Reagan got his colon and prostate surgery at Walter Reed. Watch what they do, not what they say.
If you got a head injury in Iraq, you'd have the best chance in the world of surviving with as much of your brain left as possible in the military health system. Ditto with saving a leg or an arm.
The National Institutes of Health is the biggest medical research center in the world. They've done more important research, and won more Nobel prizes, than the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry put together.
I leave it to Gordon Crovitz to explain how the U.S. government created the Internet.
NASA put the first man on the moon.
Does the invasion of Normandy count?
You — and others — seem to have misconstrued my argument to mean, the government simply can not do anything. That's not, what I said. They can do it — just poorly.
Is not it a little early in the conversation for ad hominems?
I base this on several years of the Wall Street Journal comments page, until I gave up on them. And I read lots of conservative articles on health care policy. There are conservatives who change their minds based on the facts, but in my experience they are rare. William Buckley is dead. The WSJ editorial page has turned into a Pravda for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The military and Veterans Affairs medical centers give some of the best care in the world
Citation needed?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22Veterans'+Affairs%22
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1007474
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7979780
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/86/1/121.abstract
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/93/12/2128.abstract
In case you're not used to reading medical journal articles (and most people aren't), the point of these studies is that they took the medical conditions that they most frequently treated, and were responsible for the most deaths, like heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney disease, where different doctors treated the same patients different ways, and they did randomized, controlled trials to see which treatments worked at all and which were better. They also did studies of different VA hospitals to see which hospitals had better and worse outcomes. They tried to improve the hospitals with worse outcomes, and if that didn't work, they shut the departments down.
If you go to any major medical conference, and go to the sessions on important diseases, you'll usually hear them talking about the "VA study." That's because in many medical specialties, the VA did the major, best-designed study to find out which treatments work and didn't work. There are a few private non-government organizations, like Kaiser-Permanente and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who do the same thing, but (not to disparage them), the VA does a lot more of these studies.
The National Institutes of Health also does big studies like that. Of course, with the budget cuts, they can't do as many, and they're being forced right now to decide which important ongoing studies will have to go, as Science and Nature have been reporting.
Everybody who follows medical research knows this. If you say, the government can't do anything well, they'll know that you don't know anything about the reality in this important field.
And as for those complaints about the bad outcomes in VA hospitals -- those are the kind of thing that happen in any hospital. It's easier to find out what happens in the VA hospitals because of their internal accounting and disclosure policies. You'll notice that the story got that information from the government's own review. Try to get that same information from private hospitals. What matters is when doctors who know how to compare hospitals compare large numbers of patients, to see whether there are any statistically significant patterns. When they do that, the VA hospitals usually do well. And when they don't, they find out why and how to change it.