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The way government does tech is outdated and risky

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Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#71

Post by vonmoltke »

moron4hire wrote: post #53

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 prototyp…

With the government, depending on how "involved" your customer is in the contract, they might have a shitfit if they find out you are doing this. As another poster in this section noted, there are plenty of government and quasi-government[1] employees who seriously believe that you can't start writing code until you have defined all your requirements and prepared a design to meet those requirements.

[1] People who work for companies like MITRE that are basically privatized extensions of the government.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#72

Post by gohrt »

smurph wrote: post #57

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…

I once worked for a very successful software company with a customer base that included government (IT installations), academic (college courses lab work, hardware research), financial (banks), and industry (computer hardware manufacturers).

We built a platform, and had a consulting wing that built custom "apps" on top of it.

We did Waterfall and CMMI. Waterfall was most intense for the consulting projects. I remember being assigned to build feature 3.2.2.1 in the spec.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#73

Post by mbesto »

leelin wrote: post #3

For the MIT alums out there, I remember a 6.170 exam that had the question: "When is it appropriate to use the waterfall model of development?" The answer was any time you are developing software for the government! The professor specifically mentioned it in lecture once, so that alone was enough for full credit on the question (other reasonable answers were fine too). Later I TA'ed the class twice and made sure to e…

Interesting fact - the original design of "waterfall" isn't what we perceive as "waterfall" today: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/orig...

My theory - agile/iterative development rarely gets sold because we continue to believe we aren't susceptible to planning fallacy.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#74

Post by gohrt »

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…

GNU Hurd died because Linux appeared, folks like RedHat combined the GNU userspace with the Linux kernel.

It was a massive success -- everyone put in the part they did well -- kernel + userland + distribution = WIN.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#75

Post by buro9 »

The US (and rest of world) should take a leaf out of the UK's recent initiative: GDS (Government Digital Services)

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

Aside from creating https://www.gov.uk/ which laid down a lot of principles on how to fulfil a government contract (as well as the foundations of what goverment websites should look like and how they should be developed), GDS is also looking at the problem of procurement.

The GDS team essentially are wrestling back from the big contractors the major contracts, breaking the work down into a large number of bitesize contracts and then farming them out to a wide variety of smaller vendors.

So instead of finding a Fujitsu/Siemens JV team, or an IBM Professional Services team, operating a £50m project, the plan is to offer 100 x £250k projects to a large number of smaller suppliers instead. Each project having a clearer purpose that is more able to be fulfilled.

Of course there are obvious overheads in managing so many projects, and of course some of these projects will fail. But... overall the savings will be such that the overheads are cheap, and the failed projects will only have a smaller impact on a major programme initiative than a failure would today.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#76

Post by bane »

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,…

The federal procurement process is one of those cases where separation of concerns hurts things. I know that things are this way to try and prevent bribery and cronyism etc. But it's clear that the pendulum has swung too far.

I've been part of the procurement process a few times from the vendor side and the layers of nested black boxes makes solving procurement issues virtually impossible and once the procurement is made massive overruns are almost inevitable.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#77

Post by wozniacki »

buro9 wrote: post #75

The US (and rest of world) should take a leaf out of the UK's recent initiative: GDS (Government Digital Services) http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ Aside from creating https://www.gov.uk/ which laid down a lot of principles on how to fulfil a government contract (as well as the foundations of what goverment websites should look like and how they should be developed), GDS is also looking at the problem of procurem…

This week a UK parliamentary watchdog described a failed National Health Service patient IT programme – the cost of which has spiralled to £9.8bn – as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”. Earlier this month the Department for Work and Pensions admitted that it had written off £34m of IT costs, incurred in an attempt to overhaul how social security benefits are paid. A week earlier Co-operative Bank said it had written off the £148m cost of a new IT system that would no longer be implemented.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/794bbb56-1f8e-11e3-8861-00144feab7...

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#78

Post by derleth »

JanneVee wrote: post #64
leelin wrote: post #3

For the MIT alums out there, I remember a 6.170 exam that had the question: "When is it appropriate to use the waterfall model of development?" The answer was any time you are developing software for the government! The professor specifically mentioned it in lecture once, so that alone was enough for full credit on the question (other reasonable answers were fine too). Later I TA'ed the class twice and made sure to e…

One case I've heard is when you don't have any changing requirements and the domain is well known. E.g. engine control software.

If the requirements don't change and the domain really is well-known, why are you writing new software? Why isn't there pre-existing software you can reuse?

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#79

Post by tfgg »

wozniacki wrote: post #77
buro9 wrote: post #75

The US (and rest of world) should take a leaf out of the UK's recent initiative: GDS (Government Digital Services) http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ Aside from creating https://www.gov.uk/ which laid down a lot of principles on how to fulfil a government contract (as well as the foundations of what goverment websites should look like and how they should be developed), GDS is also looking at the problem of procurem…

This week a UK parliamentary watchdog described a failed National Health Service patient IT programme – the cost of which has spiralled to £9.8bn – as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”. Earlier this month the Department for Work and Pensions admitted that it had written off £34m of IT costs, incurred in an attempt to overhaul how social security benefits are…

All projects that were definitely not under GDS' management, more likely Crapita.
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