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The way government does tech is outdated and risky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Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#91

Post by 6d0debc071 »

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…

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

Maybe not, but "treat me as a liar" doesn't seem viable either.

Any time you take an extra measurement you introduce a chance for that measurement to be in error. If you make that it so that any single measurement is a show-stopper, then every time you add an extra check you make things a little bit worse, right up to the point where your false positive rate overwhelms your data.

Even with an extremely low error rate, the number of best deals in the world for a given thing is 1. If the goal of your system is to get that, then making any measuring system a single point of failure that tests once is a death sentence. If the number of good and honest software houses that will respond to your call is low, then your false positive rate is going to be extremely high... and again, having such a system is going to be ill-advised.

Especially if the system itself suffers from not having the people who are actually going to be using the system, and people who understand how the systems should be created and run, making at least part of the decisions.

If there were a greater degree of feedback between procurement, requesters, and providers, with the ability to modify the plan, then you could potentially check your work - reducing the consequences of such failures. Not "absolute trust," but at least "hear my side of the story, maybe you've just misunderstood something."

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#92

Post by cfinke »

peterjancelis wrote: post #88
derleth wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not in my backyard syndrome.

You mean Not Invented Here.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#94

Post by allochthon »

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,…

This is distressing.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#95

Post by allochthon »

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…

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

I agree -- this is not a simple challenge. But I don't think stultifying bureaucracy is the answer, either. There must be some government out there, somewhere in the world, that has sorted out an efficient, effective procurement process.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#96

Post by marcosdumay »

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 more than a year... and the contractor was another governmental entity. The rules are maddening, but they are necessary for a democracy.

The problem is that governmental IT is out of place. The government will never be competent in contracting software development - the only known tool that works in keeping government contracts honest is auctioning, and agile is simply not compatible with auctioning. The only possible way out is by doing IT in-house.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#97

Post by marcosdumay »

gohrt wrote: post #74
nraynaud wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> folks like RedHat combined the GNU userspace with the Linux kernel

Once Linux was good enough, RMS himself set Hurd aside, put the Linux kernel into the GNU project that he started, and (almost literally) declared mission accomplished. It wasn't folks like RedHat (that only came years later), the developers of Hurd were the first to kill it.

But then, since Hurd has quite an interesting architecture, people keep developing it, like dozens of OSs out there that'll never get anywhere, but are fine with that.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#98

Post by marcosdumay »

hga wrote: post #83
xarien wrote: post #80

Coming from a 6+ year stint in a defense contracting, I can safely say that the issue with this approach happens well before the testing. The problem more often than not occurs at the requirements level.

Bingo. The government, which took the role of integrator, kept making requirements changes, right through the week before launch. They also did integration testing ... and of course ignored that that failed hard. I can't see any way CGI Federal et. al. could have won.

> The government ... kept making requirements changes

So, just like every client every developer ever had?

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#99

Post by artsrc »

danso wrote: post #29

If this is the software that's developed for millions of public users, imagine the software developed for in-house use, where the users are too few and too unsavvy to see how the software could be better (this is the case with most businesses, not just government)...this applies to basic information processing and to software interfaces for our sophisticated weapon systems. And even the software for info systems can…

Software for in-house use might be fine.

Bureaucracy reduces efficiency.

The more organizationally significant the software the worse risk there is.

Processes and procedures are the ways institutions manage risk.

So the more significant the software is the less efficient the production of it is.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#100

Post by bpyne »

svachalek wrote: post #90
mbesto wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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