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The way government does tech is outdated and risky

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#121

Post by zb »

bpyne wrote: post #100
svachalek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you perceive as waterfall? That's exactly the way we learned it in school...

Much of our industry believes Waterfall means a single-pass development process. Dr. Royce explicitly said to do it twice. (It was a military officer who later took the process and made it into a single pass.) If you learned it as a two-pass process, then you learned it correctly.

This is simply historically incorrect. Waterfall means a single pass by definition.

Royce described the pre-existing state of the art - the single-pass model (Waterfall) - and suggested a modification to a 2-pass model. (This can be seen as a precursor to Boehm's n-pass Spiral model.)

To suggest that the single-pass model was invented later as a corruption of Royce's paper is nonsense. Virtually all software was developed this way both before and after the paper.

What is odd is that the earliest and most commonly cited reference to the Waterfall methodology is a paper that explicitly says that it doesn't work. Let this be a lesson on not burying the lede.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#122

Post by narag »

marcosdumay wrote: post #96
squidfood wrote: post #17

Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…

Well, federal government worker here too, but not on the US government. Those rules are there because a malicious worker can cause a huge amount of damage. They are a pain (one entity I worked once spent about $15k (in people time) contracting $100 worth of ssl certificates, in a process that took more than a year (so, no certificates for the site during a period), we were forbiden from contracting the service for mo…

An in-house team serving several departments can work well: providing infrastructure, defining communication protocols, quality and security standars, helping subcontracting.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#123

Post by scotth »

mryan wrote: post #120
scotth wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of like Not In My Backyard as an opposite to NIH.

They are not synonyms - NIH is correct in this case. NIMBY means something rather different.

I said they made good opposites. I suspect you misread.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#124

Post by DanielBMarkham »

This is not a bad article. The reporter manages to cover a complex subject in an easy-to-understand way. I liked it.

I will point out, however, that there's a huge assumption lurking in there that wasn't explicitly stated: somebody on the government side has to know what they want and be willing to take the heat if they get it wrong. _This_ is the reason so many agencies prefer waterfall -- there's enough obfuscation and paperwork involved that when somebody complains, and in high-risk projects there'll always be complainers, nobody is really at fault. The coder guys can point back to the designer guys. The designer guys can point back to the requirements guys. You'd think that the requirements guys, the guys at the front of the waterfall, would catch all the blame, and they do. But they just write bug tickets because some aspect of the process wasn't followed well enough.

You can spend hours or days trying to figure out what went wrong and not know anything more than you did before you started. Which is exactly why the system has evolved the way it has.

I hear a lot more government projects are going to be Agile. Here's wishing them luck. If done correctly, Agile will 'debug' the organizational problems that lead to this bad performance over and over again. If they just sprinkle a little Agile nomenclature on top of things, it won't do anything at all.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#125

Post by bpyne »

zb wrote: post #121
bpyne wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of our industry believes Waterfall means a single-pass development process. Dr. Royce explicitly said to do it twice. (It was a military officer who later took the process and made it into a single pass.) If you learned it as a two-pass process, then you learned it correctly.

This is simply historically incorrect. Waterfall means a single pass by definition. Royce described the pre-existing state of the art - the single-pass model (Waterfall) - and suggested a modification to a 2-pass model. (This can be seen as a precursor to Boehm's n-pass Spiral model.) To suggest that the single-pass model was invented later as a corruption of Royce's paper is nonsense. Virtually all software was deve…

In the version of the paper linked earlier in the forum, I take the following to mean two passes: build a model and then use lessons learned to build the final product. But it's a matter of interpretation and semantics. My own interpretation is contradicted further down in my comment by someone from that era (see the Larman paper linked). C'est la vie, I'm sticking with my interpretation. I think we can agree that Royce did not mean our modern "Agile" approach.

"If the computer program in question is being developed for the first time, arrange matters so that the version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version insofar as critical design/operations areas are concerned."

At least 2 methodologies existed before Royce's paper as described in this paper: Waterfall and "iterative and incremental".(http://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/downloads/misc/history-of-it...)

Note that, in the section referencing DoD-Std-2167, the author of the DoD standard does state explicitly that he understood Waterfall to be one-pass. Certainly he implicitly promoted it as such.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#126

Post by jheriko »

actual problem: government is incompetent at leadership because it is saturated with politicians whose main skill is only convincing you they are competent leaders. no leadership skills actually required.

if government were competent stuff like capitalist economy and privatising public services would always be bad (provably - actual proof, not just overwhelming evidence - but there is overwhelming evidence too).

leaders intuit things like agile and don't label them - instead of picking it up from a book and implementing it badly because they don't understand first principles.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#127

Post by walshemj »

bpyne wrote: post #100
svachalek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you perceive as waterfall? That's exactly the way we learned it in school...

Much of our industry believes Waterfall means a single-pass development process. Dr. Royce explicitly said to do it twice. (It was a military officer who later took the process and made it into a single pass.) If you learned it as a two-pass process, then you learned it correctly.

I always thought waterfall was inherently iterative you could jump back up the stack at any point in the process one sucsessfull project I worked on at BT (management system for the Uk's SMDS network) had several instances of going back and redoing stages before we even got to the final development phase.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#129

Post by zb »

walshemj wrote: post #127
bpyne wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of our industry believes Waterfall means a single-pass development process. Dr. Royce explicitly said to do it twice. (It was a military officer who later took the process and made it into a single pass.) If you learned it as a two-pass process, then you learned it correctly.

I always thought waterfall was inherently iterative you could jump back up the stack at any point in the process one sucsessfull project I worked on at BT (management system for the Uk's SMDS network) had several instances of going back and redoing stages before we even got to the final development phase.

Have you ever seen water jump back up a few stages of a waterfall? (Hint: no.) It's called the Waterfall model exactly because that kind of thing is explicitly not part of it (see Figure 2 in the Royce paper linked above). That's the whole point of the name.

It goes without saying that no software development effort has ever lived up to this standard. Nonetheless, the fact that it is not possible to develop non-trivial designs (for software or anything else) like this in no way prevented people from advocating it as the "ideal" design process.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#130

Post by lmm »

jamii wrote: post #47

It's interesting that the UK seems to be getting around this by doing stuff in-house. So now we have the open government license ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen... ) and government websites that take pull requests for content.

It's the only way that works. You can contract out parts of your implementation, but you need a certain level of in-house technical expertise just to not get taken for a ride by your contractors.
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