Did they do a character count and submitted that as LOC to justify the high costs?..
Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
71–80 of 115 posts
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#72Let's be clear: This number could not be accurate, even if it included the line counts of licensed code (SDK's, database engines, etc.). The article failed to even cite its source, beyond saying that "one specialist" said this.
The NYT is a left-leaning publication. This seems to be a transparent attempt to try to soften the blow to the Obama administration's image by saying that implementing healthcare.gov was a Herculean task that no one could have gotten right on the first try because it required a half billion lines of code. It's no coincidence that this article emerged the day before Obama himself plans a press conference on this very issue.
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#73hahaha what a crock of bull. Probably the same experts that built it were quoted as saying that. Or maybe it is true... when you cut and paste every code snippet from the web and mush it up to create this site it does add up to 500m lines of code..
Anyone have detail on language they used and/or frameworks(s)?
Someone should be held liable for this. They just wasted tax payers money on would be experts and have to spend more tax payers money to fix it. Disaster!
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#74Who told them to use vanilla php to make everything , 500 million lines of code is an astounding amount of code . Next step put up a disclosure/FOI request for the source code of the healthcare.gov so that we can know what they were writing in there.
I doubt you'd get it from an FOIA request. I believe there's an exemption that covers work like this.
Right — no one there knows how to edit the database credentials out of the PHP source. :)
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#75I suspect that as unbelievable as this sounds, it might actually be true. There must be a ton of "repeated code" to handle all of the different states and rules. I'm guessing that they started with one huge bloated "template" and then wrote automatic code generation systems that just copied everything hundreds or even thousands of times.
They could very well now find themselves in a position where it is humanly impossible to untangle it all and make even the smallest changes. I'm calling it failed at this point.
Edit: Title was changed from: Healthcare.gov "contains about 500 million lines of software code". This comment reflects this fact which seems unbelievable, but if true, I feel would likely mean that it was mostly created by code generators that probably copied and ossified original errors and misconceptions to the point that it is no longer possible to fix. Its a total failure, the money is gone, but they'll keep throwing even more after it, until the tiny, disjointed systems they develop in the mean time as "temporary solutions" eventually become the "real" system.
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#76> 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."
In something this loaded with politics, I wouldn't imagine anyone involved would think it a good career move to have their names attached to bad news quoted in the press?
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#77That's a staggering amount of code. Nearly unbelievable. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was 45 million lines of code[0]. [0] https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532
Yeah, I'd call total BS on that number, unless they did something absolutely insane... I mean, we're talking "instead of saving user information in the database, we codegen'd a set of classes specifically for each regisered user and save them to our repository" level of insanity. Has there ever been software that's even come close to approaching 500 million lines of code?
Imagine someone threw together some automatic code generation thing. It tries every possible input and then creates a special if-then statement for it.
Don't worry, the compiler will optimize it.
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#78> 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."
Perhaps because people working on the project would be fired for talking to the press?
You know, "war on whistle-blowers" and all.
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Contractors can certainly be under an obligation to meet standards, particularly when this is specified in the contract. However, there is no ISO standard that says "a program shall not reach five hundred million lines of code even if you include all the autogenerated XML and suchlike".
Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
#80Less than 10 million lines of code are required to fly an F-35 -- and that is C++. Who is the contractor responsible for this? Perhaps the same people responsible for the Ontario EHealth scandal: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth-scandal-a-1b-w...
> Perhaps the same people responsible for the Ontario EHealth scandal…
I don't know if you were being facetious, but you're not far off:
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/mee...