President stompy-feet and the Obamacare website
Was listening to his Rose Garden speech today and he had this to say about the website.
From
Business Insider:
OBAMA PROMISES: 'The Website's Gonna Get Fixed � And The Law Works'
Flanked by people who he said have benefitted from the Affordable Care Act so far, President Barack Obama acknowledged on Monday the problems and glitches that have plagued the law's rollout.
"There's no sugar-coating it," Obama said at an event in the Rose Garden of the White House, referring to the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the federal website where consumers have had anything but a smooth time signing up for health insurance.
"No one is more frustrated than I am."
While acknowledging the problems with the website, Obama hailed the parts of the law that have already helped the 13 people that joined him onstage in the Rose Garden. At times he defiantly said that the website is "gonna get fixed." He didn't provide many specifics on that point, other than noting that people will be working overtime to fix it and that the White House will bring in outside experts � a "tech surge," as he said.
He has obviously never heard of
Fred Brooks or
Brooks's law:
Brooks's law is a principle in software development which says that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. The corollary of Brooks's Law is that there is an incremental person who, when added to a project, makes it take more, not less time. Brooks adds that "Nine women can't make a baby in one month".
So true and shown time after time after time on projects big and small.
Healthcare.gov started with a crappy foundation and adding manpower to it will only gild the pig, it will not make it better.
His seminal work can be found at Archive.org:
The Mythical Man Month and is a great read for any person involved in management, project planning, programming or working with others. I cannot overstate this.
Final observation, the website is said (
from Slate) to have 500 million lines of code of which five million need to be rewritten. There is a standard metric in programing where you talk about one thousand lines of code or one K lines of code or one
KLOC (pronounced Kay-Lock).
This puts the website at 500,000 KLOCs with 50,000 KLOCs needing to be rewritten.
I used to work at Microsoft when Windows XP and Windows 2K were shipped. Windows XP -- the entire distribution with utilities and even gorilla.bas -- everything -- was about 450,000 KLOCs.
One government website has almost the same number of lines of code as a very mature and robust operating system from Microsoft.
healthcare.gov will go down in history as the example everyone turns to when citing examples of code bloat and code written by a committee.
As an example, a website for a large bank or an ecommerce site has about 100 times fewer lines of code. That code is written by a tightly managed group of people who know what the F@#$ they are doing and talk to their cow-orkers every day.
A company like SAP or Amazon or Google could have banged this out in 18 months for under five million dollars and it would have worked out of the box. Instead, we have spent three+ years and $634 Million of our taxpayer dollars and gotten this...
Posted by DaveH at October 21, 2013 8:41 PM