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Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

forbes.com

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Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#31

Post by powertower »

chimeracoder wrote: post #17
powertower wrote: post #10

> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies. The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...

> The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-... . It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, including people with pre-existing conditions will mean either that those people are required to pay for the (expected, not actual) costs of their own care, or that other people will be required to pay for those…

> It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this...

I was surprised because I was told that this new coverage affordability came from getting insurance companies greed in check.

I didn't know that insurance companies were actually lobying for Obamacare, not against it.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/62541/here-s-the-proof-oba...

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#32

Post by Retric »

sunraa wrote: post #15
mrharrison wrote: post #3

I know the people who worked on this. This is not what happened. Just yet another propaganda piece by Forbes.

Per the NYT: "But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start... (October 12) And from today (Oct 21): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-nee... In a previous life I worked on similar software developmen…

You don't need 100% final requirements to start building the system. If nothing else start working though the interfaces with other systems, and try and get as close as possible to a working prototype. Granted funding is often an issue, but even a tiny team given a few months head start can get a lot done.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#33

Post by sp332 »

darkarmani wrote: post #8
mrharrison wrote: post #3

I know the people who worked on this. This is not what happened. Just yet another propaganda piece by Forbes.

> the interface kept asking me to reenter the information for our dependents. Farther on in the process it doubled the number of our children (to 6!) Even though it listed our children’s names twice (identically) and even though these clones had identical SS numbers, the validation software was not smart enough to realize that the duplicate records were describing the same people! This didn't happen? Are you suggesti…

The article, as the headline states, is about poor requirements dooming the project.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#34

Post by twistedpair »

briandear wrote: post #6
mrharrison wrote: post #3

I know the people who worked on this. This is not what happened. Just yet another propaganda piece by Forbes.

Well something happened. You might want to tell those guys that 500 million lines of code is a bit ridiculous.

I wonder what those LoC were for? XML parsing remote API calls between various disparate systems? Sounds like it's well beyond operation system complexity. Linux kernel is currently 15M LoC.

Then again, kernels and operating systems are quite logical and laid out by architects. Systems like these are rats nests defined by bureaucrats and integration nightmares.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#35

Post by twistedpair »

skwirl wrote: post #27
chucknelson wrote: post #20

Wow, this particular excerpt from the article is stretching things a bit too thin: "Clearly there are problems with the government’s IT procurement processes, but if the same level of dysfunction had been present in the software behind Obama’s political campaign (as it was, apparently, behind Romney’s) the President would have never been reelected." Really? I doubt the campaign websites were the deciding factor. Anyw…

They aren't talking about the campaign websites. Both campaigns had complex internal software systems to help target field worker campaign activities, get out the vote efforts, monitor and respond to turnout data on election day, etc. According to various reports, the Obama campaign was hugely successful in this endeavor [1] while the Romney campaign's election day voter turnout system was a disaster [2]. [1] http://…

But that is a very agile, very incentive aligned project. You don't need to negotiate compromises and tip toe around various laws to run some stats for your media predictive analytics. Your vendors want you to continue in the campaign, so they still have contracts. Everyone is running for the same goal line.

Health care and insurance entitlement programs are clearly orders of magnitude more quadmired before a single line of code is written.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#36

Post by uxp »

babs474 wrote: post #19
gesman wrote: post #7

Could anyone share which platform / framework they used?

mnsure.org was throwing springframework exceptions the day it launched

healthcare.gov itself was a Ruby Jekyll static site. It was on GitHub[0] for a while, but mysteriously disappeared. Here[1] is a clone of it, and what seems to be the currently agreed upon canonical version.

My state appears to be using Joomla based on the meta-generator tag in it's head tag. http://www.avenueh.com/

[0] https://github.com/CMSgov/HealthCare.gov-Open-Source-Release

[1] https://github.com/blencorp/HealthCare.gov-Open-Source-Relea...

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#37

Post by joshuahedlund »

chimeracoder wrote: post #17
powertower wrote: post #10

> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies. The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...

> The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-... . It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this. Mathematically, including people with pre-existing conditions will mean either that those people are required to pay for the (expected, not actual) costs of their own care, or that other people will be required to pay for those…

> It still boggles my mind that people are surprised by this.

I agree with your mathematical observation, but maybe part of the surprise that such math was often underplayed or outright ignored in the claims that premiums would be going down, ex. [0][1])

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/presid... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/health/health-plan-cost-fo...

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#38

Post by Plasmoid »

Retric wrote: post #32
sunraa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the NYT: "But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start... (October 12) And from today (Oct 21): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-nee... In a previous life I worked on similar software developmen…

You don't need 100% final requirements to start building the system. If nothing else start working though the interfaces with other systems, and try and get as close as possible to a working prototype. Granted funding is often an issue, but even a tiny team given a few months head start can get a lot done.

On government contracts that's actually a problem. You can't bill for any work you did without 'authorization'. Which means you can't do anything until a finalized spec, signed in triplicate, is physically delivered to you.

Re: Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

#39

Post by twistedpair »

drakaal wrote: post #16

I didn't see anything that meant it was doomed from the requirements stage. This was more of an Obama love fest and defense of ObamaCare than a technical article describing who the backend was doomed. For what this cost to build it could have been much better, much simpler, and handled the scale gracefully. Yes privacy concerns keep it off the elastic cloud. (not a point mentioned in the article) Yes authenticated us…

They screwed the pooch, clearly. However I wouldn't assume that the insurance landscape is so simple. You're talking about an insurance industry and legal system that has had a fifty year head start making the process of insurance buying as complicated and obfuscated as possible.
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