

Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right - douglasback
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bottom-of-healthcaregovs-flop.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

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TheCoelacanth
Outsourcing a project that level of complexity is never going to end well. The
only way to consistently produce good, highly complex software is to have
stakeholders closely involved in every step of the process. You simply aren't
going to get that level of involvement when you pass off development to
contractors.

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hga
Ah, but the stakeholders, CMS on up to the White House, _were_ "closely
involved in every step of the process", e.g. CMS was the integrator (now
replaced with contractor QSSI).

Unfortunately incompetent at that role/a bit too close, e.g. issuing change
orders right through the week before launch, or ... well, I'll leave it as an
exercise for the reader why they delayed doing their integration testing till
1, maybe 2 weeks before launch, and then ignored that the tests failed
hard....

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grej
Interesting article but it doesn't really address the key issue. The reason
government IT doesn't get tech right is not because they don't use Agile. The
problem is much bigger than just switching to user stories.

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smalera
"The president should use the power of the White House to end all large
information technology purchases, and instead give his administration’s
accomplished technologists the ability to work with agencies to make the right
decisions, increase adoption of modern, incremental software development
practices, like a popular one called Agile, already used in the private
sector, and work with the Small Business Administration and the General
Services Administration to make it easy for small businesses to contract with
the government." > "use Agile"

