[ExI] Millions of Lines of Code

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 6:16 AM, Omar Rahman <rahmans at me.com> wrote:

>
> Hi Kelly,
>
> There is no doubt that the website is a bloated piece of $#!+. The only
> question for me is how they achieved such epic levels of bloat and
> craptasticness.


Bureaucracy.


> The suspected size of the code base displayed on the site you gave puts
> this thing in a league of it's own. But seriously, how did they manage to
> make it so big?
>

Cut and paste coding on an industrial scale? Or perhaps, since this is a
government project, they did something stupid and told the developers that
they would be paid for every line of code... hehe. That would do it.


> Thousands of plans x thousands of insurers x 50 state versions x thousands
> of procedures might do it but that's data and not code.


Apparently, that is what did it. All tied together with some kind of web
services calls.

Also, they must have used at least 100 million lines of code to
program Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/14/debbie-wasserman-schultz-i-meant-what-i-said-were-running-on-obamacare-next-year/

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/23/cnn-blowing-up-healthcare-gov-and-starting-over-still-looking-like-their-best-option-say-more-tech-experts/
Maybe they should throw the whole damn thing out and start over by hiring a
software architect. I am guessing that a lot of the code is intended to
implement various things in the 1500+ page Obamacare law, which is
unpardonably large for a law to begin with, but who knows?

Are they counting the data set as part of the code base? I honestly have a
> hard time imagining how they achieved such bloat. I guess it's a failure of
> my imagination because somehow they seem to have done it.
>

Here are a couple of pithy quotes from Slate:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/21/healthcare_gov_problems_why_5_million_lines_of_code_is_the_wrong_way_to.html

 If the site really contains 500 million lines of code, they say, *that’s a
strong hint that the programmers involved are doing something wrong.*

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the coding question-and-answer site Stack
Overflow, wrote in
2006<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/diseconomies-of-scale-and-lines-of-code.html>:
“Here's the single most important decision you can make on your software
project if you want it to be successful: *keep it small.* Small may not
accomplish much, but the odds of outright failure—a disturbingly common
outcome for most software
projects<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000588.html>—(are)
low.”

===
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/bitwise/2013/10/what_went_wrong_with_healthcare_gov_the_front_end_and_back_end_never_talked.html
"Writing in Medium in defense of Development
Seed<https://medium.com/p/4c61174aa073>,
technologist and contractor CTO Adam Becker complains of “layers upon
layers of contractors, a high ratio of project managers to programmers, and
a severe lack of technical ownership.” Sounds right to me."

"Power flows upward while responsibility flows downward, which is why you
couldn’t pay me to work as a government contractor. It’d be like going back
to Microsoft<http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/08/microsoft_ceo_steve_ballmer_retires_a_firsthand_account_of_the_company_s.html>
."

David Auerbach
===

Apparently, CGI, one of the big contractors on the project hasn't even
hired a spokesman to explain their side of the story. That should tell you
how bad it is all by itself. It's so bad, we don't even want to talk about
it because that would be digging our own grave.

My prediction stands. Obamacare will fail. Obama will blame the insurance
companies, and now the software programmers and designers too. In the end,
it will be EVERYBODY's fault but Obama, and we'll all be working for the
government trying to fix their code. If they can make us pay taxes for
things we don't want or need, then they sure as hell can chain us to a desk
and make us code. We'll write trillions of lines of code hehehe...

-Kelly
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