O Tempora!

The Obamacare web software rolled out on October 1^st was about the worst flop the world has ever seen. This software was supposed to handle millions of requests to handle registration for President Obama’s signature legislation. It continually crashed, or said it was busy or gave other error messages. Finally, the Obama administration had to admit that the software had “glitches”.

Was anybody surprised by this bomb? I wasn’t. I spent 40 years in developing software, teaching computer science and providing software support. My career includes two stints as a US government employee and two positions with government contractors. I’ve also worked on integrating old software and databases with new software.

The Obamacare web interface and supporting software were supposed to connect to a variety of other software, such as software at CMS (Medicare contractor), IRS, DHS, VA, SSA and even Experian. This isn’t easy, especially if some of the other software was not designed to connect to other applications.

Actual coding of this monstrosity began in the spring of 2013, per the New York Times. That’s because the government took nearly three years to provide specifications for the software. As late as September, features were still being changed. End-to-end testing was done only at the last minute, according to this article in the Washington Post. And testing failed miserably just before the launch date, as CBS reported. Also, there were data data security problems, per NPR.

Any private-enterprise web site that was experiencing such problems would have come clean and announced a delay in the launch. But the government practices political computer science, not real computer science. I saw this first-hand when I was a government worker. So the Obama administration crossed its collectivist fingers, apparently expecting a miracle to occur, and announced healthcare.gov was ready. It WASN’T.

After about two weeks of utter disaster, the administration admitted that there were “glitches” and that these would be fixed by November 30^th. I’d believe them if they had said “November 30, 2014”. You can’t fix a gigantic software system as broken as this one in six weeks. If they’re lucky, it might be more-or-less bug-free in six months.

Of course, once the software is fixed, we’ll still be stuck with Obamacare, the dumbest idea since Medicare. For more on this, see http://aropmeto.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-disaster-of-obamacare.html.