As a BAH employee, I'll throw myself on the grenade with two comments:
BAH didn't do any IT work on healthcare.gov. Our tiny part (1% of the total cost) was around the business process related to IT eligibility. I build web applications for government agencies, all day, every day. The issues that CGI Federal allowed into healthcare.gov are inexcusable. A freshman in high school could look at the non-static, uncompressed JS and CSS alone and know this thing would die under load. BAH is a large company made up of many different teams, but for the team *I* am on, this system wouldn't even have made it past our CI server.
Second, as I said, BAH is a large company. There are all sorts of "analysts" who can throw around acronyms and buzzwords like marketing pros. It wouldn't shock me to know that some of these people do indeed think their shit doesn't stink or who don't listen to their client like they should. I'm just a code monkey, working in my own little corner of this big company. But on my projects, we don't do this. Hell, we CAN'T do this, because the client is the primary source of information and requirements that go into the apps I build.
So, Ben, if that was your experience, then by all means, call it out. Just asking everyone else to remember that BAH is a huge company, and not everyone there behaves like that. Just like any large business, there are bad apples. But some of us do actually try to get things right.
I second that (or third or whatever). Fusebox is by FAR the most effective methodology/architecture I have come across in over 5 years of ColdFusion development. It is simply fantastic. And not just for CF, it works with JSP and PHP as well (and ASP to a more limited degree due to the way ASP parses included files).
Further, the XML Fusedoc code documentation / program definition language is also awesome. To sum up, if you are using ColdFusion I would highly recommend that you check these out. Fusebox is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for ColdFusion application development.
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As a BAH employee, I'll throw myself on the grenade with two comments:
BAH didn't do any IT work on healthcare.gov. Our tiny part (1% of the total cost) was around the business process related to IT eligibility. I build web applications for government agencies, all day, every day. The issues that CGI Federal allowed into healthcare.gov are inexcusable. A freshman in high school could look at the non-static, uncompressed JS and CSS alone and know this thing would die under load. BAH is a large company made up of many different teams, but for the team *I* am on, this system wouldn't even have made it past our CI server.
Second, as I said, BAH is a large company. There are all sorts of "analysts" who can throw around acronyms and buzzwords like marketing pros. It wouldn't shock me to know that some of these people do indeed think their shit doesn't stink or who don't listen to their client like they should. I'm just a code monkey, working in my own little corner of this big company. But on my projects, we don't do this. Hell, we CAN'T do this, because the client is the primary source of information and requirements that go into the apps I build.
So, Ben, if that was your experience, then by all means, call it out. Just asking everyone else to remember that BAH is a huge company, and not everyone there behaves like that. Just like any large business, there are bad apples. But some of us do actually try to get things right.
I second that (or third or whatever). Fusebox is by FAR the most effective methodology/architecture I have come across in over 5 years of ColdFusion development. It is simply fantastic. And not just for CF, it works with JSP and PHP as well (and ASP to a more limited degree due to the way ASP parses included files). Further, the XML Fusedoc code documentation / program definition language is also awesome. To sum up, if you are using ColdFusion I would highly recommend that you check these out. Fusebox is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for ColdFusion application development.