Obama is making a big mistake by continuing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) enrollment while the main software this enrollment depends on, the healthcare.gov website, is buggy:
“There’s no excuse for the problems,” he added, “and they are being fixed.” He said the government is “doing everything we can possibly do” to repair the site, including 24-hour work from “some of the best IT talent in the country.”
Ahh — the “best and the brightest” will now “surge” to win this decisive battle. Haven’t those concepts failed before?
Throwing more resources onto a broken mammoth software project is likely to increase the problems and to delay a bug free version. Software engineers and IT managers have known this law for decades:
“adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
Engineers who have not been involved with this software so far will now have to be trained by the people who know it. Total productivity will therefore sink. Discussions about design issues that had been held and decided months or years ago will start anew. Bugs that had already been cleared will be reintroduced. Communication within a 24 hour team will be very difficult, lead to miscommunications and further delays.
If this report about the site’s problems is halfway correct the troubles will not end within a month or two:
In interviews, experts said the technological problems of the site went far beyond the roadblocks to creating accounts that continue to prevent legions of users from even registering. Indeed, several said, the login problems, though vexing to consumers, may be the easiest to solve. One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.
“The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later,” said one person involved in the repair effort.
The website’s task is to mask the very complicate process that is demanded by the law with an easy user interface. Currently parts of the user interface are in trouble and will be fixed but the real problems are more likely in the various back end connections to other databases and the complicate rule base that transfers the letters of the laws into a product choice decision.
The reasons for this failure are the usual ones and were foreseeable at the project’s start. An inexperienced integration management team, ever changing requirements and a lack of testing:
One major problem slowing repairs, people close to the program say, is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency in charge of the exchange, is responsible for making sure that the separately designed databases and pieces of software from 55 contractors work together. It is not common for a federal agency to assume that role, and numerous people involved in the project said the agency did not have the expertise to do the job and did not fully understand what it entailed.
…
In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times. It went live on Oct. 1 before the government and contractors had fully tested the complete system. Delays by the government in issuing specifications for the system reduced the time available for testing.
Throughout my IT managing career I have seen dozens of such project disasters. They are quite normal. About every second big IT project fails to reach its intended usefulness. Most of the projects will not meet the proposed timeline. But those projects were not about political legacy and most of the processes they covered had some alternatives that, though more costly and time consuming, could replace them.
So what should Obama do? He should stop the current enrollment process and push all relevant dates at least six month out. Stop the customers from coming, repair the shop and only open anew when you are sure that you can serve everyone. By sticking to the current process and the buggy software Obama will only increase the mess and the political damage.
All these problems were of course unnecessary and Obama can only blame himself for them. Medicare is a quite well run system that already does for some parts of the U.S. population what the new law wants to achieve: Provide some reasonably prized health insurance. Expanding medicare, an established system, would have been much easier than this new process which is more about shuffling money to insurers, and now also software developers, than about getting healthcare for everyone.