[News] Easier to recode Healthcare.gov

• Kingofrunes wrote on 2013-10-23 20:11
  Welp, the US Government has done it again. Most important piece of software to make Obamacare work and not fuck over everyone else is broken. It has so many security flaws/bugs in it that it's much easier to start from scratch all over again instead of trying to fix it.
  
  Seems that the government made it a rush job which led to a poorly designed piece of garbage. Government really shouldn't push things like this with unrealistic expectations.
  
  The laziness of the government really left this a mess, combined with the unrealistic deadlines. *le sigh*
  
  Here's the article
  

  
  After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.
  
  But would-be Obamacare enrollees only have until Dec. 15 to sign up for coverage starting at the beginning of 2014. Nish Bhalla, CEO of information-security firm Security Compass, said it "does not sound realistic at all" that Healthcare.gov will be fully operational before that point.
  
  "We don't even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?" Bhalla said. "It's like a drive-by shooting: You're going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can't fix what you can't identify."
  
  Several computer engineers said it would likely be easier to rebuild Healthcare.gov than to fix the issues in the current system. But it's unlikely that the government would toss out more than $300 million worth of work.
  
  The sheer size of Healthcare.gov is indicative of a major rush job. Rolling the site out too quickly likely increased the number of errors, and that makes the fixes more difficult to implement.
  
  "Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code," said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. "So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you're tracking it down all through the code base."
  
  To put 500 million lines of code into perspective, it took just 500,000 lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows 8 operating system reportedly has about 80 million lines of code. And an online banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines. A "more normal range" for a project like Healthcare.gov is about 25 million to 50 million lines of code, Kennedy said.
  
  "The [500 million lines of code] says right off the bat that something is egregiously wrong," said Kennedy. "I jumped back when I read that figure. It's just so excessive."
  
  Applicants might be able to at least register for Obamacare sooner than that, even if the site isn't 100% perfect. The New York Times report said five million lines of code need to be replaced just so the site can run properly.
  
  
  But the Obamacare website has bigger problems than simply getting people registered for health care. The code is also riddled with security holes, according to Kennedy, who outlined his cybersecurity concerns on Trusted Sec's company blog.
  "If someone can't register, that's obviously bad -- but if the information gets hacked, you're talking about one of the biggest breaches in American history," Kennedy said. "I think security is an afterthought at this point."
  
  That might not be a major issue now, as people are still having trouble logging onto the site. But once it's up and running, that code had better be made more secure.
  
  "At this point, the car isn't even moving," Bhalla said. "But once we're speeding down the road, you're going to want that seatbelt to work."
  

  
  Source: http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html?iid=HP_LN
  
  What's your thoughts on it?
• Osayidan wrote on 2013-10-23 22:32
  It just seems to be a curse, at least in north america, that whenever government tries to launch a project that depends on some kind of software/IT it just goes terribly wrong. Especially when it's health care related.
• Yoorah wrote on 2013-10-23 23:40
  This wasn't outsourced through elance or anything similar. The project was contracted to CGI Federal, which is a major tech firm. Other major companies, such as Booz Allen Hamilton (think work for the NSA), were also involved.
  
  I wouldn't blame the programmers. The problem was that the project was driven by politicians--the programmers were given unrealistic deadlines by people who didn't understand the process at all. Amazingly, during integration testing (think of it as an internal beta test), it wasn't engineers from private software firms who did it, but rather government workers. They declared that the system worked as intended (either because they were incompetent or because their politician bosses told them to do so). So no, doing this in-government wouldn't have produced better results; you'd have gotten the same pile of poop, but with a price tag 2 times higher.
• Kingofrunes wrote on 2013-10-23 23:49
  I see...I'll edit my OP a bit then...
  
  Took what one of my old coworkers said as fact without researching it properly.
• TLCBonaparte wrote on 2013-10-24 00:03
  So today I was playing Democracy 3, I played 2 long games. In one, I went full liberal and end up in huge sum of debt I can't get out of, but people LOVE me, 74% approval rating. In the other I play conservative focusing on rich people and capitalist, I raised my country's credit rating to AAA but only got 30% approval rating... Politic is hard :(
• Cynic wrote on 2013-10-24 00:05
  Hopefully they extend the sign-up date for people because of this. People shouldn't have to suffer because of the Government's incompetence.
• Aubog007 wrote on 2013-10-24 14:22
  They won't rebuild it. it's the government, they will keep throwing cash at it until it's "fixed"
  
  Kinda like where we work, it's cheaper to build a new facility, but NOPE, KEEP UPGRADING OUR OLD SHITTY ONE.
• Kingofrunes wrote on 2013-10-24 14:31
  no amount of cash will fix shitty software. More and more bugs will keep popping up and it will be extremely expensive to maintain or add any new features.
  
  If they keep throwing money at it trying to fix it, it's eventually going to make obamacare too expensive to maintain and this country will collapse under the debt of trying to fix it.
• Juno wrote on 2013-10-24 18:01
  The 14 states that made their own exchange have everything working swimmingly. I imagine more states will jump on that bandwagon if this keeps on.
• Kingofrunes wrote on 2013-10-24 18:20

  Quote from Juno;1162877:

  The 14 states that made their own exchange have everything working swimmingly. I imagine more states will jump on that bandwagon if this keeps on.

  
  
  Sometimes the states can do a much better job at getting shit done than the federal government can.