[jarrett]

I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project.

I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms.

Maybe that number was hyperbole. I don't know. But if it's true, I shudder at the thought.

[Iftheshoefits]

This is just the way government contracting works. The "Prime Contractor" is often explicitly required to subcontract out a "meaningful" portion of the work to sub-contractors for a variety of reasons. Mostly because, as touched on in the article, the DoD/lobbyist revolving door has legislated a huge system of what is effectively corporate welfare in the form of contracting. The government throws money and a few "senior engineers" and management staff to oversee the Prime, and the Prime does the a similar thing to oversee the subs, plus some higher-level integration work (which may or may not require a significant staff), and the subs frequently either buy pre-made "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS) and sell it at a markup (a big markup) or are selling their own "COTS" product to the Prime (that they develop with in-house/contracted staff), also at a substantial markup.

The public reason for this crap is that the system is supposed to be structured to make sure that accountability exists, favoritism is minimized, and employment is boosted (by spreading out the work). The reality is that the system is designed to maximize the enrichment of the lobbyist-connected owners of the contractors.

[nraynaud]

I think there are a lot of secondary objectives in those rules. Being secondary, they are not pushing for a working website. Stuff like town and country planning (putting a building in an area that need jobs), economic (the made in USA, small business), social (hire old people, disabled, women in tech etc.), competitive process to keep the prices in check (haha), bulk buy to get some discount etc.

Obviously when you have so many targets, you don't hit a lot. Maybe the obamacare website was perfect in some secondary objectives.

But it also arises from perfectly true premise, that big spending is a force on the society and that it as secondary effects, and that maybe we can twist those effects in a political manner. The whole Silicon Valley is living on federal actions.

[jcromartie]

This is called "teaming", and it's a big game of you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours in gov't contracting.

[adestefan]

This also has to do with the laws that mandate projects over a certain size need to have x% of small businesses, y% of veteran owned business, etc.

[nraynaud]

Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I'm a bit wary of this "open-source is magic" mantra, that's putting a lot of cooks in the burning kitchen. Open-source means community management, public relations with opiniatred people, Linus-grade emails, and if you have really a big participation but no strong leader, it ends up like GNU hurd (is it dead yet ?).

It's all about organization, and trying to have just enough people to get the work done and nobody more, and the right people, and this has nothing to do with open or closed source.

[gohrt]

GNU Hurd died because Linux appeared, folks like RedHat combined the GNU userspace with the Linux kernel.

It was a massive success -- everyone put in the part they did well -- kernel + userland + distribution = WIN.

[marcosdumay]

> folks like RedHat combined the GNU userspace with the Linux kernel

Once Linux was good enough, RMS himself set Hurd aside, put the Linux kernel into the GNU project that he started, and (almost literally) declared mission accomplished. It wasn't folks like RedHat (that only came years later), the developers of Hurd were the first to kill it.

But then, since Hurd has quite an interesting architecture, people keep developing it, like dozens of OSs out there that'll never get anywhere, but are fine with that.

[jordanthoms]

Making the code open source isn't going to solve all those problems - but it would make things more transparent. People both inside and outside the government would be able to see what they got for the money spent, and if things are being done in stupid ways it'd be a issue earlier.

[hga]

That doesn't seem to be the problem with healthcare.gov, or at least not in the way you suspect it might be.

The government, that is, HSS's CMS, took on the role of integrator, including integration testing (perhaps "Prime Contractor" as mentioned elsewhere). They aren't known for expertise in this (the Pentagon can do this with medium sized weapons projects, which are a rather different field anyway), and ... really screwed up:

They and those above were late with specifications and requirements, kept changing them (7 major ones in the last 10 months per the NYT), were making changes in the week before launch, and when they did a simulation test of 200 simultaneous logins just before launch the modules locked up. As did the site shortly after its midnight launch.

Oh, yeah, three days after the launch CMS panicked and proposed to fire Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI, a unit of United Health Group) and punt their identity backend system (based on an Oracle package that's known to work), but eventually decided that would take longer than QSSI getting it to work. Who knows, but that's another sign of CMS as the integrator failing hard while distracting both QSSI and CGI Federal.

Now, maybe it ended up being too many cooks because CMS didn't provide strong oversight and coordination, but....