The healthcare dot gov website had many
problems. Some of the problems included: “page not found” and
“system down” error messages, spinning icons, and faulty
information from the exchanges [1]. Their Data Center had periods of
outage which also affect other agencies [2]. All of this combined
with downtime expected until late November [3], makes it seem
like they needed to implement a better design from the start. The
project was initially very complex, including proper use of software
and hardware (datacenter), and being an entire system built from the
ground up. It is the mashup of three major contracts, each with their
own requirements: to provide a new e-commerce site, a new information
middleware infrastructure, and a hosted data center integration
project[4], this just adds to the complexity. Second, the whole
system depended on data provided by Experian, which was
error-prone[1], they needed to have time to make sure their code can
handle all the errors that can come up. Third, the specifications for
the project were delayed repeatedly then changed frequently up to
within a month of the target release date[4]. This resulted in design
changes and rewriting parts of the system without having time to
check for bugs. For which they didn't even know how to across
multiple systems [4]. Since the requirements kept changing until the
last minute, there was no way to do a full site testing until just
weeks before the release date. Nearly every component of the site was
brand new, untested and unproven against any real-world load. Because
of the general dislike of obamacare coming from certain groups and
instead of having to do a rolling release of bug-fixes and upgrades,
they should have released the project late but working.
No comments:
Post a Comment