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We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

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Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#61

Post by joshuahedlund »

penguat wrote: post #55
joshuahedlund wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is my personal experience with some of that "poorly written" code: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-web... > the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!

That sounds like poor BA/spec work. BA asks: "what do we need from this username". BA should ask "what do we need from usernames overall"? It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.

A fair point. Other examples of problems were empty drop-down menus from presumably non-cached failed DB accesses[0] and forgot password links in emails leading to an error about no match found for the provided information [me], which I suppose you could respectively file under 'unexpected heavy load' and 'bug' rather than 'poorly written code', though at some point no matter how you classify the problems it makes me nervous to submit my information because I wonder what security holes are waiting to be discovered along with the other problems.

[0]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/untangling-obamacar...

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#62

Post by WesleyJohnson »

jmarin wrote: post #44

has anyone here actually attempted to use the site, or just reading about how it fails? The only commenter I've read was using IE. I just signed up and had no problems.

I tried signing up the day it launched and ran into issues with 404s. After 3 or 4 days, I was finally able to create an account. When I went back the following day to login for the first time to choose a plan, I couldn't login.

I get a message saying my login credentials are incorrect. I hit the forgot password link and enter in my username. It finds my account and sends me a password reset email. I click on the link in the password reset email and it takes me back to healthcare.gov with an error message that my account can't be found, which obviously makes no sense because they just used my account to send me an email.

Live Chat has provided zero help, only stating that it's probably a performance issue and to try back later.

One odd thing is that the registration page says you a need a lower case and upper case character, a number and at least one symbol from a pre-defined set. To my knowledge, I didn't use an uppercase character, nor do I use one when do the password reset, which properly sends me an email. I feel like maybe the login portion is properly validating the username requirements, but the registration didn't which is what has left me in this mess.

Sorry, this site isn't worth $600 million.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#63

Post by mploi123 »

I have worked with IT consulting for the government (in Brazil), and if the software needs of the american government are similar to the Brazilian ones, you can't compare twitter, instagram, etc. with this! They are completely different kinds of software, governmental softwares have tons of integration with old COBOL systems that runs millions of sensible data, and tons of requirements, really, pages and pages of different use case scenarios. Governmental software require more man-hours than successful start ups, even when they work and succeed as a project. The "MVP" of a governmental system is huge. Now, don't get me wrong. the price is absurd, this example is clearly a total failure. It's just that this article compare apples to oranges.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#64

Post by cturner »

Osmium wrote: post #8
Tloewald wrote: post #7

> the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken This.

How would you fix it? I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing o…

Idea for a bidding model: Bidders for government contracts would need to put a large amount of money in trust. The government pays them interest on this, plus alpha. If they weren't meeting targets, then the government could just eat into the trust money.

Now the risk management is no longer being done by government, but by the banks who lend you the money. They specialise in such work. This a similar dynamic to film financing.

Imagine the secondary market that would pop up for the risk underlying such projects.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#65

Post by jzwinck »

I told https://www.healthcare.gov/ that I want to apply and live in New York. It immediately gave me a link to http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/ . I clicked the link, and it says:

> Access Denied > You don't have permission to access "http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/" on this server.

Why would the top level of such a site have permissions at all?

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#66

Post by zachrose »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #42
zachrose wrote: post #37

There are a lot of interesting things to say about a $634M website that didn’t work when it should have, but what pops out at me here is the description of “poorly written code.” This article even links directly to some of the code, which A) looks fine? and B) is like “Yeah, the problem wasn’t with procurement regulations or clear requirements or public-private cronyism or managerial competence, it was that damn pers…

Here is my personal experience with some of that "poorly written" code: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-web... > the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!

Your descriptions of the painful bugs are all apt, your absolutely right that it should deter anybody from feeling like their data is in good hands.

But just as you can find a bug deep in the code, you can also go up the stack and ask how it got there: how were the specs for a valid username defined and published? Where were the tests—or at the very least, QA procedures—that should have encoded and verified those specs? Where were the managers that should have made sure those tests existed? Where were the manager's manager that should have delegated resources to the manager to get those tests written? Where was the manager's manager's manager who knew how to hire someone who would value quality control? Who was on the government procurement panel that did not adequately assess their contractor's ability to deliver quality?

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#67

Post by 001sky »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #29

Political organizations exist for political reasons. So if you get elected to "do something" about orphans, you'll create an organization to do something. The goal of this organization is political: appear to be making progress on the orphan problem. At the very least, do not appear in the news as an example of government waste. The current website problem is a political failure -- it looks bad. But that's just a sho…

The problem with this logic is that carte balche on an amex is no way to run a government, even if every dime spent is sucessful in "keeping you in power". To the extent that one is rationalizing the status quo, it is pointing out the obvious. Unfortunately, the math no longer works and the system is going to be reset as someone else has to pick up the tab. It may be republicans or it may be your children. But whomever gets stuck with the bills is going to be pissed off, methinks. Part of being a successful politician is not creating deep-seated enenimities.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#68

Post by smoyer »

arbuge wrote: post #35
smoyer wrote: post #21

Imagine what this community could build with more than half a billion dollars!

It is easy to see that. What's needed is somebody to shake up the whole government contract procurement system. A gigantic schlep right there...

Very true ... how do you fit that into the 3 months before demo day?

I'm seeing a system that contains a complete list of government contractors/sub-contractors (this actually exists today). For each company, a list of verified skills (a proven track record) would allow a procurement agent to narrow the field, and a reputation system that let's the cream rise to the top.

I'm not sure it would be feasible to track the employees that make up a company as that's pretty fluid (on the time-scale of government contracts), but in the software field, you could (for instance) sum the reputation of the company's developers stack-overflow profiles.

Obviously, a lot more thought is required!

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#70

Post by venomsnake »

dkhenry wrote: post #22

Good thing we are giving the federal government control over the healthcare system ( and positioning them to take even more control as we move towards single payer ). I am sure they won't screw it up like they have the the roll out of this small portion of the system. Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down.

I feel really strange knowing more about US healthcare than people that have to use it.

The so called obamacare is mainly about access to healthcare. To the people that are left out. Also it is a Republican creation from the early 90s, when the people from the right were actually trying to devise policies rooted in reality with a chance to work.

What it does is actually increase the power of the free market by forcing everyone to trade their goods out in the open transparently.

There is no government control or rationing.

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