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Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

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Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#61

Post by hga »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #56
robomartin wrote: post #52

I am trying to not get sucked into political discussions on HN because, well, they are bad for you. There are a wide range of people on HN with different ideas. From the demographics derived from occasional polls quite a few of you are younger and less experienced in life and business. That's not a put-down, just a fact. There's also a layer of HN participant with obvious college-originated indoctrination that is har…

US has lower life expectancy than Poland. It has lower life expectancy than any of the 19 developed nations. It has life expectancy at the level of developing Eastern European nations like Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, etc. At the same time US spends the biggest percentage of its GDP on healthcare. More than Germany does, more than France doesm more than UK does, more than Japan does. And people in France and Japan live…

"US has lower life expectancy...."

Talking point ignoring:

Different countries can have different populations with markedly different health characteristics. That is, "race" in the sense of genetics; in the US, not just African-Americans but plenty of mestizos with a lot of Amerindian genes. Not that I know anything particular about what the latter brings to the table, just that it's sure to be different ... and, heck, the former is a unique population, right?, and neither are in large numbers in any parts of the 1st or formerly 2nd Worlds.

Different countries use different methods, e.g. to my knowledge no other country in the world tries to save premature etc. babies as much as we do, and scores failures to do so as deaths. Neonate deaths are a very major factor in overall life expectancy calculations, since so much potential lifetime is lost.

Those who are interested in bourgeois truth look at things like life expectancy after being diagnosed with X type of cancer. And even then you have to adjust for different populations.

And you compare us to Japan, as genetically homogeneous as you're going to find after they disconnected from the rest of the world and most kept that in modern times??? Please....

Plus plenty of those systems you refer to have free market characteristics, which you weasel with by saying "100% taxation sponsored" ... which I'm not sure really includes any of them but Canada, and they have the obvious fudge---part of their official system, too---of crossing the border. (By that I mean they're the only ones I know of to outlaw private healthcare.)

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#62

Post by jacalata »

iyulaev wrote: post #3

Why don't we take the brilliant hackers and programmers at the NSA and task them to fix and re-build the ACA exchange system? Building a database to track the communications of ever single person in the US and ever foreigner they talk to? Piece of cake. Building a database to track the health insurance policies for a subset of Americans? Over budget, behind schedule, still doesn't really work yet. Priorities.

What makes you think that was on time or in budget?

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#63

Post by tcdent »

djillionsmix wrote: post #51
trentmb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's very annoying to read. EDIT: To clarify, his style is incredibly annoying.

Annoying to people who don't like that he's correct

I agree with his thinking, but his presentation is just too in-your-face.

It can be hard to find a balance when communicating something you're passionate about.

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#64

Post by rbanffy »

djillionsmix wrote: post #51
trentmb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's very annoying to read. EDIT: To clarify, his style is incredibly annoying.

Annoying to people who don't like that he's correct

Actually, no. He isn't right.

Any significant programming project involves more than one person. Being arrogant is probably the most serious flaw in a programmer. You will be wrong. You will under or overestimate something important. You do have blind spots. Most important, you are not as smart as you think you are. If you are not careful, your mistakes will ruin your project. They'll delay you or create liabilities you'll have to deal with.

Methodologies exist to help you manage yourself, not for your managers to better manage you (although they can be misused for that).

You don't have to feel "humiliated" by them (neither methodologies nor managers). You don't have to be insecure.

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#65

Post by rbanffy »

I almost convulsed when I read "“modern” software practices, called agile development, just like commercial companies do".

No company in the club of companies governments hire does it. There is no agile way to cut through all procurement rules, all documentation requirements and all miscellaneous bureaucratic processes (required in order to prevent government funds misappropriation) present in any big project, much less one so publicly examined.

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#66

Post by ternaryoperator »

tunesmith wrote: post #59

This seems to be a flawed analysis based off of a flawed analysis... First, agile principles don't imply that an agile approach will always succeed where a waterfall approach will fail. It merely asserts that agile increases (not guarantees) the likelihood of success. Second, the article's three sources didn't "proclaim that HealthCare.gov would not have failed if it had just used “modern” software practices, called…

>"It merely asserts that agile increases (not guarantees) the likelihood of success."

That's not my understanding. I understand Agile to assert that it's better able to accommodate changes to the project during development.

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#68

Post by hga »

jacalata wrote: post #62
iyulaev wrote: post #3

Why don't we take the brilliant hackers and programmers at the NSA and task them to fix and re-build the ACA exchange system? Building a database to track the communications of ever single person in the US and ever foreigner they talk to? Piece of cake. Building a database to track the health insurance policies for a subset of Americans? Over budget, behind schedule, still doesn't really work yet. Priorities.

What makes you think that was on time or in budget?

We don't hear much about it, but the NSA has had some stunning IT failures. Development (heck, they can't open their Utah site because of severe, ruin $100K of hardware each time, power glitches), something major above their collection system(s) failed hard once for more than a few days ... and since they're the No Such Agency, we only hear about some of the very worst ones, I'm sure.

Flip side is, doing this in the black budget does allow them to avoid some of the usual government contracting insanities. While that's no gaurentee of success, e.g. look at the NRO's recent expensive stumbles, from the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway I've gotten a strong impression the intelligence community does a generally much better job than run of the mill open Federal IT.

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#69

Post by jroseattle »

GhotiFish wrote: post #55
jroseattle wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you suspect that version control wasn't in use? Is there an aspect of this project that would be resolved with a specific version control system? These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely curious why you're asking.

A guess at his line of thinking: People, who didn't understand the development processes programmers use, caught a wiff of agile. They mandated agile, but only established the methodology, with no technical direction to back it up. So in the arena of VCS the novice teams didn't use anything (they didn't know better), teams with some experienced devs were ignored, or used their own VCS. a symptom of a more systemic pr…

Wow, that's alarming.

We need a real post-mortem on this process. The congressional inquisitions aren't getting to the root of the problem. We just need the individual who managed this project to explain, from square one, how the project flow went.

(Believe it or not, I intend no sarcasm with this post.)

Re: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

#70

Post by GhotiFish »

jroseattle wrote: post #69
GhotiFish wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guess at his line of thinking: People, who didn't understand the development processes programmers use, caught a wiff of agile. They mandated agile, but only established the methodology, with no technical direction to back it up. So in the arena of VCS the novice teams didn't use anything (they didn't know better), teams with some experienced devs were ignored, or used their own VCS. a symptom of a more systemic pr…

Wow, that's alarming. We need a real post-mortem on this process. The congressional inquisitions aren't getting to the root of the problem. We just need the individual who managed this project to explain, from square one, how the project flow went. (Believe it or not, I intend no sarcasm with this post.)

>(Believe it or not, I intend no sarcasm with this post.)

that didn't help T.T

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