Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site • Hacker News Board

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#61

Post by EdgarVerona » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:43 AM UTC

spikels wrote: post #38

"One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly." Yikes! I don't think these "experts" are going to be fixing this anytime soon.

The sad part is that it sounds like they're already being paid to do so - they were quoted as being Federal Contractors.

We really need a public peer review system for technical contracting of government projects. This is getting insane. These schmucks fleeced 500 million from our government (us) for a barely functioning website, and now some snake oil contractors are going to come in to "fix it" and fleece us for even more.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#62

Post by EdgarVerona » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:46 AM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #9

I wonder what languages it focuses on. I haven't heard. I find some of it amusing - I've worked on some enterprise-level projects with business systems talking to other business systems, and I can only imagine how much eye-rolling is going on among the programmers that are actually trying to do the work. This is a project where some very visible, loud people have a vested interest in it looking bad even if it were fl…

The sad thing is that the site being bad should be really tangential to the politics. I personally would love to see outright socialized healthcare, where everyone was mandatorally enrolled in a government created program. I feel like we'd have the most leverage to bring costs down under a centralized and non-profit system. However, this system being as broken as it is - and costing as much as it has - did nothing to help that cause, even though it should be tangential to it. Very frustrating.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#63

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:47 AM UTC

growupkids wrote: post #57

ChuckMcM wrote: post #42

Pretty sure that is a direct rectal extraction number not a real number. If there were 500 million lines of code you would have a prima facie case for fraud on the part of the contractor since government contractors are required to use best industry practices and no industry practice supports 10x code expansion.

That's just not true. Contractors are only required to deliver what they proposed and the government agreed to.

Is it possible its different for DoD contractors? I ask because Lockheed in Sunnyvale took some heat (I believe a fine and a restriction on being able to bid on contracts for a period of time) for failing to use 'established industry practice' in the testing and delivery of what ever it was they were delivered. My neighbor at the time worked for them and recounted the gruesome (or in this case non-standard) details. I never really thought to question whether or not it was actually written that way, it just made sense that it would be. When I was with Intel and Intel was building milspec 8080s there were a list of standards that had to be met and all of the test equipment was calibrated based on that as well. Seemed like a pretty natural part of the government contracting business.

So you're saying that Contractors are under no obligation to meet standards? Or just that this contractor would be exempted? Or perhaps software in general would be exempted?

( Apparently NIST is involved somewhat : http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-applica... )

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#64

Post by yen223 » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:50 AM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #26

There's no way that's true. No possible way. For a website. Did they write their own operating system from scratch? And database?

They probably count generated code. SQL generators aren't known for their LOC efficiency.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#65

Post by derleth » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:52 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #42

Pretty sure that is a direct rectal extraction number not a real number. If there were 500 million lines of code you would have a prima facie case for fraud on the part of the contractor since government contractors are required to use best industry practices and no industry practice supports 10x code expansion.

They might be including all of the HTML in addition to all of the library code and all of the code in all of the interpreters and compilers they used, but even that probably comes up short.

Maybe if they include all of the possible HTML the site could generate, but counting potential code seems perverse even beyond the usual cluelessness of the mass media when talking about software.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#66

Post by camus2 » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:52 AM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #22

jussij wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is they're counting code from existing packages used to create the site. So for example, if they used Java, that line count is including the lines of code found in the JDK. I see no other way of getting to such a large number.

What was the site written in?

it's either Java or .net , but it feels more like Java. i'm more interested in knowing what the data layer is made of though.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#67

Post by nostromo » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:55 AM UTC

> According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code.

> One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

Oh, so only 1%!

Tangentially, why are so few quotes in this article sourced? I see no reason why they shouldn't be. It's all throughout the article... They keep quoting "specialists."

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#68

Post by harold » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:57 AM UTC

From March of this year:

Chao said that he’d once held high hopes that the exchanges would run smoothly from the beginning, but that those hopes had been dashed. “The time for debating about the size of the text on the screen, or the color, or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,” said Chao. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/03/22/cms-on-...

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#69

Post by lmkg » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 5:59 AM UTC

My own conspiracy theory: XML "code" got included, even the stuff that is unambiguously data. This may or may not include HTML templates (possibly machine-generated) and the data files for each individual health care plan. This is the result either of naive use of a line-counting utility, or a miscommunication between technical and non-technical folk, or both.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#70

Post by derleth » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 6:00 AM UTC

code_duck wrote: post #52

javert wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I completely agree with you in general, a nit pick: > I bet not even mission-critical code written to power NASA spacecraft and satellites are anywhere near that length. That doesn't seem like a good example. You want to keep the code in those kinds of things to a minimum, and that's probably not too hard.

It's best to keep the code in everything to the minimum!

> It's best to keep the code in everything to the minimum!

Optimizing for readability is usually most important.

Readability is usually more important than reusability, in fact, although readability very often enables reusability.

But we're talking about mission-critical embedded code, which is a special case in many respects. Still, making it as readable as possible makes bugs easier to find.