The way government does tech is outdated and risky • Hacker News Board

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#51

Post by roin » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:59 PM UTC

njharman wrote: post #40

joe_the_user wrote: post #37

Has anyone noted that the government perhaps just shouldn't be in this kind of business to begin with? Any market based solution website has to be very agile and responsive [edit: to succeed at it's goal] but the government can't be super responsive and in many ways shouldn't be super responsive. The state spends all of our money and enforces mandatory decisions concerning our lives. The state shouldn't have the agil…

> Any market based solution website has to very agile and responsive This is provably false by visiting any number of old, large company websites, esp in healthcare or banking. In addition the government isn't in this kind of business, it outsources almost everything to "free market" companies, who extract as much margin as they and their lobbyists can get away with. Complexity has much more to do with size of and nu…

I'll second this one, I spent five years at a major consulting company working in large banks and insurance companies, and there was NOTHING agile about development.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#52

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #48

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,…

> I firmly believe that procurement acts this way not because the government is fundamentally incompetent, but because the Public, and thus Congress, BELIEVES we are incompetent There's almost 3 million federal workers. Many more if you include people who work on government contracts. The Federal Government is by far the biggest enterprise in the US by both employees and revenue. With such a large organization, there…

[deleted]

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#53

Post by moron4hire » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

The problem is not necessarily Waterfall, it's people's unimaginative approach to it. I've done plenty of projects for clients that wanted a Waterfall methodology, and I did it by writing the documentation and the prototyping code at the same time. In other words, Agile fits inside Waterfall. The requirements gathering phase in Waterfall projects is so incredibly long that you can definitely afford to make a prototype or 5. And you win huge points with your client when you're done with the requirements phase and get to say that development will take "only two months".

You have to treat prototyping as part of the requirements gather process. Then, when requirements phase is done, you have to treat "development" as really "testing". Because, for the types of clients that are going to insist on a Waterfall project, the final testing is really only a cursory user acceptance testing and they really don't have the skills necessary to determine if you've met their requirements or not.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#54

Post by jordanthoms » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

nraynaud wrote: post #21

jarrett wrote: post #5

I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project. I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms. Maybe that number was…

Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I'm a bit wary of this "open-source is magic" mantra, that's putting a lot of cooks in the burning kitchen. Open-source means community management, public relations with opiniatred people, Linus-grade emails, and if you have really a big participation but no strong leader, it ends up like GNU hurd (is it dead yet ?). It's all about organization, and trying to have just enough peopl…

Making the code open source isn't going to solve all those problems - but it would make things more transparent. People both inside and outside the government would be able to see what they got for the money spent, and if things are being done in stupid ways it'd be a issue earlier.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#55

Post by VladRussian2 » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

apendleton wrote: post #25

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,…

I just had a conversation with a federal employee last week talking about the issue of procurement offices being a blackbox and procurement officers not understanding the technical specifics of what they're bidding out. His solution was just to become certified as a procurement officer (apparently it's 72 hours of coursework) and deal with the bids himself. He said these kinds of problems have pretty much disappeared…

> His solution was just to become certified as a procurement officer (apparently it's 72 hours of coursework) and deal with the bids himself. He said these kinds of problems have pretty much disappeared for him since then.

sounds like a loophole one can procure a truck through :)

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#56

Post by MartinCron » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

crbnw00ts wrote: post #18

That diagram for the "waterfall" approach that they yanked from Wikipedia is a complete straw-man representation. It's nonsense. Here is the actual, original source for the Waterfall approach, first published in 1970: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/orig... If people would just bother to scroll past the first couple of pages, they will notice that the approach already includes some iteration c…

The conflict isn't between "agile and well understood waterfall" it's between "agile and waterfall as understood and implemented in the real world"

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#57

Post by smurph » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:20 PM UTC

I've had federal employees tell me with a straight face that waterfall development is the only model that works, and that is why 'all of the tech companies use it'. These people have often gone and gotten certifications for stuff like six sigma and CMMI. They will never change their tune. You basically have to wait for all of them to retire. The average government tech worker is so different from the commercial tech worker that they may as well be a different industry all together.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#58

Post by joe_the_user » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:24 PM UTC

njharman wrote: post #40

joe_the_user wrote: post #37

Has anyone noted that the government perhaps just shouldn't be in this kind of business to begin with? Any market based solution website has to be very agile and responsive [edit: to succeed at it's goal] but the government can't be super responsive and in many ways shouldn't be super responsive. The state spends all of our money and enforces mandatory decisions concerning our lives. The state shouldn't have the agil…

> Any market based solution website has to very agile and responsive This is provably false by visiting any number of old, large company websites, esp in healthcare or banking. In addition the government isn't in this kind of business, it outsources almost everything to "free market" companies, who extract as much margin as they and their lobbyists can get away with. Complexity has much more to do with size of and nu…

I should make have said something like "need to be ... to succeed". That many "market" sites aren't agile isn't the point, the point is that to be useful for the purpose of impelling lower prices for consumers, the Obamacare website needs to be agile. To the extent it isn't agile, it won't be helping it's cause.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#59

Post by lymie » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:25 PM UTC

esw wrote: post #13

buckbova wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health care site involves a web application with high number of business rules and data structures. The campaign's site is fluff.

The campaign's site was also static (see http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio... )

The campaign's site was also a small part of online technology initiatives produced by the campaign's IT staff (see http://www.donarwhalshaveblowholes.com/buy-yetisandnarwhals....)

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#60

Post by sien » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

sien wrote: post #43

It's not just the US government that has crazy, weird, inefficient technology. I'd be surprised if every government wasn't like this. The biggest IT failure in the world was the UK's attempt at healthcare computing that cost 12Bn GBP and didn't deliver a functioning system. I work as a contractor for the Australian government. I personally know of multiple project failures in the 10s of millions of AUD range and a fe…

Also, it might be worth mentioning where I work Agile development is used. It does help some but it isn't a silver bullet.

Also, I didn't explicitly say so but small companies are more efficient. If they are not, they tend to go insolvent. That's what is so good about them.