Obamacare rollout status report: central place for updates

[Matt1970]

lulz troll is lulz troll.

Go home, it's got to be your curfew by now.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

What I find hilarious is that there is a "Tech Surge". LMAO. Non-Tech folks just don't get it. Throwing more manpower at a tech problem is, at best, pointless; and at worst, destructive. The Mythical Man-Month came out when, 1970-something? And still nobody has a clue.

Anybody who has ever worked on code that somebody else has written, knows this. It can take just as long (or longer!) to read and understand a large corpus of code that somebody else wrote, as it would to re-write the whole thing from scratch yourself. UNLESS it is VERY well architected and documented, this will be a problem. Guaranteed. You could have Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Steve Wozniak staring at that code for months and still not be able to get anything done with it.

Now, I'm on the outside, so I don't know exactly how this program was implemented. Maybe, just maybe, someone had the bright idea to start off by paying a couple of smart people to lay out a high-level diagram of the whole thing, stating what modules do what, and how they interact with the rest of the system, and have teams of coders working on those individual modules, which do exactly what they were specified to do, and nothing else. However, given the software projects that I have seen, this is not really likely.

 

[irishScott]

What I find hilarious is that there is a "Tech Surge". LMAO. Non-Tech folks just don't get it. Throwing more manpower at a tech problem is, at best, pointless; and at worst, destructive. The Mythical Man-Month came out when, 1970-something? And still nobody has a clue.

Anybody who has ever worked on code that somebody else has written, knows this. It can take just as long (or longer!) to read and understand a large corpus of code that somebody else wrote, as it would to re-write the whole thing from scratch yourself. UNLESS it is VERY well architected and documented, this will be a problem. Guaranteed. You could have Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Steve Wozniak staring at that code for months and still not be able to get anything done with it.

Now, I'm on the outside, so I don't know exactly how this program was implemented. Maybe, just maybe, someone had the bright idea to start off by paying a couple of smart people to lay out a high-level diagram of the whole thing, stating what modules do what, and how they interact with the rest of the system, and have teams of coders working on those individual modules, which do exactly what they were specified to do, and nothing else. However, given the software projects that I have seen, this is not really likely.

Never mind the fact that HHS was changing the specifications as late as September.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

I'll just plop this here. It's a spreadsheet of the rates without the signup. granted it'll be wrong because it's just an estimate of age ranges but it does give you your area's risk rating and the list of companies participating.

https://data.healthcare.gov/dataset/QHP-Individual-Medical-Landscape/ba45-xusy

BTW, it's a joke. The rates posted are double(with worse coverage) what I'm going to pay for family coverage when I leave my job in a month or two to start my own business. Even with subsidies I'll be able to buy insurance cheaper on my own than using the exchange.

 

[shadow9d9]

I'll just plop this here. It's a spreadsheet of the rates without the signup. granted it'll be wrong because it's just an estimate of age ranges but it does give you your area's risk rating and the list of companies participating.

https://data.healthcare.gov/dataset/QHP-Individual-Medical-Landscape/ba45-xusy

BTW, it's a joke. The rates posted are double(with worse coverage) what I'm going to pay for family coverage when I leave my job in a month or two to start my own business. Even with subsidies I'll be able to buy insurance cheaper on my own than using the exchange.

It is competitive for my area. Speak for yourself. Hell, some of them are run by the same group I currently use, as a self employed self insurer.

 

[DucatiMonster696]

LOL - A few democrat senators are looking to push a 1 year delay on Obamacare over this mess. Even then this will no doubt be the tip of the ice-berg in fuck-ups with this government run system.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/democratic-senator-preparing-mount-push-213559118.html

 

[EagleKeeper]

Notice how the enrollment deadlines have been slipping.
Jan1 -> Feb 15->Mar 31

 

[werepossum]

Spin fail. There's a tremendous difference between six weeks and a full year.

LOL Of course. One is an ideologically driven crazy proposal which is totally unnecessary, sure to crash a system which represents mankind's closest brush with perfection, and proposed purely from a desire to do evil, and the other is a common sense proposal to improve an already great system generated from pure scientific reason based on a desire to help their fellow man.

tl/dr: One was proposed by your team, the other was not.

 

[Matt1970]

LOL Of course. One is an ideologically driven crazy proposal which is totally unnecessary, sure to crash a system which represents mankind's closest brush with perfection, and proposed purely from a desire to do evil, and the other is a common sense proposal to improve an already great system generated from pure scientific reason based on a desire to help their fellow man.

tl/dr: One was proposed by your team, the other was not.

LOL Nice!

 

[Svnla]

The contractors for the website did testify under oath today and say the "end to end" tests did not begin until two weeks prior to October 1st. None of them, zero, nada, could tell Congress when the darn thing would work.

Wow, just wow. What the hell did they do for several years and hundreds of million of dollars?

 

[blankslate]

LOL Of course. One is an ideologically driven crazy proposal which is totally unnecessary, sure to crash a system which represents mankind's closest brush with perfection, and proposed purely from a desire to do evil, and the other is a common sense proposal to improve an already great system generated from pure scientific reason based on a desire to help their fellow man.

tl/dr: One was proposed by your team, the other was not.

Oddly enough the ACA was for all intents and purposes proposed by the Republicans in the 90's after being though up by the Heritage foundation...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/graphics/2010/022310-bill-comparison.aspx

but oddities aside that is usually how it goes much of the time.

 

[Matt1970]

Oddly enough the ACA was for all intents and purposes proposed by the Republicans in the 90's after being though up by the Heritage foundation...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/graphics/2010/022310-bill-comparison.aspx

but oddities aside that is usually how it goes much of the time.

He was refering to the mandate delay request, not the ACA itself.

 

[Matt1970]

The contractors for the website did testify under oath today and say the "end to end" tests did not begin until two weeks prior to October 1st. None of them, zero, nada, could tell Congress when the darn thing would work.

Wow, just wow. What the hell did they do for several years and hundreds of million of dollars?

I heard those tests failed with just 200 people trying to access the sofware. I guess you can't come out and tell the people that the software isn't ready when the governemt is shutdown over trying to delay the mandate.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html

With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.
...
"Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code," said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. "So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you're tracking it down all through the code base."

To put 500 million lines of code into perspective, it took just 500,000 lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system reportedly has about 80 million lines of code. And an online banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines. A "more normal range" for a project like Healthcare.gov is about 25 million to 50 million lines of code, Kennedy said.

"The [500 million lines of code] says right off the bat that something is egregiously wrong," said Kennedy. "I jumped back when I read that figure. It's just so excessive."

My God... 500 million lines.... holy shit, that is a lot worse than I had thought. And you know that's got to be in a high level language like Java that takes care of a lot of stuff for you; it's not like they're writing in assembly, or even C, I should think (although it would make sense to profile the bottlenecks and pull some frequently-used functions into C for speed reasons).

 

[chucky2]

The contractors for the website did testify under oath today and say the "end to end" tests did not begin until two weeks prior to October 1st. None of them, zero, nada, could tell Congress when the darn thing would work.

Wow, just wow. What the hell did they do for several years and hundreds of million of dollars?

Is this accurate? I haven't watched any of the testimony but being involved as a ProgM/PM in software delivery for a multi-$B Corp for about 10 years now, that would basically have to be either an impossibility, or, so shockingly close to the rollout date as to absolutely push out the rollout date.

Either they didn't say that, didn't mean that, were referring to something else, or, someone in charge of this either got fed either wrong and/or misleading information, and/or, made one disasterous 'Go ahead and release' call.

It's actually unfathomable if that's true how they could have released it w/o Leadership approval to do so. They should have themselves been throwing out the anchor and refusing to release.

Chuck

 

[yllus]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html



My God... 500 million lines....

I don't believe that for a second. I bet that's a mistake or a misrepresentation - though of course, what people will repeat going forward is "500 million" and not the correction.

 

[Svnla]

Is this accurate? I haven't watched any of the testimony but being involved as a ProgM/PM in software delivery for a multi-$B Corp for about 10 years now, that would basically have to be either an impossibility, or, so shockingly close to the rollout date as to absolutely push out the rollout date.

Either they didn't say that, didn't mean that, were referring to something else, or, someone in charge of this either got fed either wrong and/or misleading information, and/or, made one disasterous 'Go ahead and release' call.

It's actually unfathomable if that's true how they could have released it w/o Leadership approval to do so. They should have themselves been throwing out the anchor and refusing to release.

Chuck

Here you go. Read it and weep for the sheer stupidity and incompetent.

Witnesses said the administration did not conduct end-to-end testing of the system's technology backbone until just the two weeks before one of the lynchpins of President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare policy opened to consumers on October 1.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/24/us-usa-healthcare-idUSBRE99M0VD20131024

The U.S. government did final tests of the Obamacare website just days before it went public, while similar projects are tested for months, the main contractors told a House panel investigating flaws that hobbled the debut.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...tors-say-final-testing-of-website-was-limited

 

[EagleKeeper]

I don't believe that for a second. I bet that's a mistake or a misrepresentation - though of course, what people will repeat going forward is "500 million" and not the correction.

Probably what was said/meant was 500k to a million lines of code.

Much more realistic.

Fits for a three year effort (from experience in DoD systems)

 

[shady28]

Probably what was said/meant was 500k to a million lines of code.

Much more realistic.

Fits for a three year effort (from experience in DoD systems)

I've got a Delphi program I maintain that I could say is 500k lines of code. But if I were honest, I'd say that only about 50k lines of it do I actually maintain. The other 400-450k lines are from the components that I added (ie pre-written code).

That's another way of saying what you're saying though, and 500k - 1 Million sounds about right.

For comparison, Windows Server 2003 is about 50 million lines of code.

So if the 500M is accurate, they would be saying that they coded something 10x larger than Windows Server 2003, from scratch, in 6 months, and deployed it with 2 weeks of testing.

I don't think that happened, but if it did, god help anyone who put their personal info into it.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing-weeks-to-fix.html?_r=0

One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.
...
Nevertheless, disarray has distinguished the project. In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times. It went live on Oct. 1 before the government and contractors had fully tested the complete system. Delays by the government in issuing specifications for the system reduced the time available for testing.
...
According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size.

Well, it's in the NYT, but they are quoting an unnamed "specialist". So, grain of salt, but it's not like this is coming from an anti-Obama source. And the original was published on the 20th, with no corrections as of the 24th.

:shrug: I have no idea, it sounds way too big to me too, but this is the only source we have at the moment. Maybe it will get corrected.

 

[sactoking]

500 million may be a legitimate number: you have to remember that the whole project is made of dozens of modules, some custom some off-the-shelf, all shoved together. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was something like 400 million lines of code in 50-75 modules plus an extra hundred million lines of custom code to try to get all of the modules communicating.

 

[Bowfinger]

LOL Of course. One is an ideologically driven crazy proposal which is totally unnecessary, sure to crash a system which represents mankind's closest brush with perfection, and proposed purely from a desire to do evil, and the other is a common sense proposal to improve an already great system generated from pure scientific reason based on a desire to help their fellow man.

tl/dr: One was proposed by your team, the other was not.

So you're also such a bleating partisan hack that you can't see the tremendous difference between delaying 6 weeks and delaying 52 weeks? Got it. (Hint: 52 is nearly a full order of magnitude bigger than 6. Look it up.)

Also FYI, your incessant straw man caricatures are both boring and useless. If you are truly so incapable of addressing others' positions honestly and accurately, kindly don your Incorruptible badge so nobody wastes time trying to talk to you.

 

[Bowfinger]

Here you go. Read it and weep for the sheer stupidity and incompetent.
[ ... ]
http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...tors-say-final-testing-of-website-was-limited

The U.S. government did final tests of the Obamacare website just days before it went public, while similar projects are tested for months, the main contractors told a House panel investigating flaws that hobbled the debut.

The bolded is not quite accurate based on the segment of the testimony I saw. The statement was more along the lines of, "Ideally, months." rather than a direct answer to the question re. what is the standard industry practice. That said, two weeks is completely inadequate. It shows that the development cycle was way too compressed.

 

[Bowfinger]

I don't believe that for a second. I bet that's a mistake or a misrepresentation - though of course, what people will repeat going forward is "500 million" and not the correction.

That seems way too high to me as well. I've worked on some huge systems, but never anything anywhere close to that.

 

[PokerGuy]

500 million seems like a crazy high number of lines, but it would not surprise me one bit if the idiots running this thing compensated contractors / firms based on the number of lines of code, thus resulting in an incredible bloated pile of garbage.