
Uncle Bob on Heathcare.gov - swanson
http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/11/12/Healthcare-gov.html
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kenkam
Call me a cynic -- here is a well known, renowned software development
methodology expert who makes money on giving talks, books, etc. He argues that
regulation of the software industry is a solution. Specifically: "I'd be
thinking about what languages and processes we should force them to use". He
just argued his business case. This makes me take whatever he says with a
large pinch of salt.

Also, he makes dramatic points which have little to do with the problem. He
describes the challenger problem, where a teacher's life could have been saved
-- there were children waiting for that lesson! How is that relevant to what
we're dealing with? I think it's a poor analogy only used for dramatic effect.

All this makes me feel the article as insincere and merely cashing in on the
bad launch of healthcare.gov.

~~~
swanson
I read the whole "Repercussions" section as from the point-of-view of a
government official. The repercussions are that they start mandating and
regulating - developers/companies probably don't want this, but that could be
a likely fallout from more large-scale, failed, tax payer funded projects.

~~~
maxk42
Regulating the software industry will set us all back 100 years.

Innovation blossoms where people are free to innovate.

------
bmelton
I find it hard to empathize with this article, for a lot of reasons, but
mostly because I'm not sure if the premise is true.

It is indeed very easy to write software that will later fail, and not know
that it will fail while you're writing it. It's even very possible to have
software that is failing, very publicly, and not know why.

Aside from levying blame here (which I think falls to management for having
changed scope within weeks before launch), the thing that most people seem
unwilling or unable to accept is that the website itself is a black box to a
legacy government system. As with all black boxes, there's absolutely no way
to know how it's expected to behave under load, especially when it seems that
nobody ever got around to load testing it.

I would be very surprised to hear if there were those 'in the know' who could
have scuttled the launch here because there wasn't any testing. Now, for sure,
there very well ought to have been people saying "We can't launch without
testing!", but even if there were people in that capacity, that would have
surely seemed like fear-mongering, and could likely have gotten them cast as
evil Tea Party members, given the public pressure (and political pressure) to
launch.

Let's not forget that the alternative would have been to delay the effects of
the law, which is a debate that shut down our government for a time. The
outcome here, in my opinion, doesn't levy blame on the software industry, but
at worst, on software industry within the government. That system is indeed
very broken, and I think blame appropriated upon it is warranted -- even
though systems do succeed in spite of it.

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MrZongle2
_" The Software Industry failed to deliver healthcare.gov. As a result,
millions of people are being hurt. We did that, folks. It was our industry,
our failure."_

Wrong.

 _That_ "industry" had about as much to do with how _real_ software is
developed as an actor in a medical drama has to do with saving lives.

 _That_ industry was typical of the revolving door between corporations and
government. Don't try to pin that train wreck on software developers like me:
this is the work of politicians, clueless middle managers, and profiteers.

I don't know how you apparently got into my family, "Uncle Bob", but I want a
divorce. Moron.

------
maxk42
Fuck Uncle Bob.

