To what degree are the problems with the Obamacare website due to sabotage?
I heard an interesting discussion on radio yesterday. (Diane Rehm Show, to be exact)
While there is no doubt that there are real problems with the Obamacare website operations and enrollment mechanism, the journalists suggested that at least some portion of the problems are because anti-ACA people are deliberately trying to overwhelm the site to prevent others from registering.
My personal thought is that there was deliberate sabotage, but not by users (as said on the radio) but by the contractors who built the website infrastructure poorly, on purpose.
I’m certainly not averring that all the problems are deliberately caused, only that some were/are made worse because of intentional human effort.
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Possibly, but a question for any IT folks out there is, wouldn’t the site have been thoroughly beta tested or am I being naive?
It is nothing out of the ordinary. The servers for Diablo 3 and Sim City 5 also went down on release because of too many simultaneous connections from users.
Plus the issue that government contracts usually go to the company that can do it the cheapest, so there will be less time/money for bugfixing and testing.
What @ragingloli said. This happens every time there’s a major release of anything that requires an online sign-up. I’m surprised that people are surprised.
Anyone who has anything to do with software development expected there to be huge problems with this site. Anyone writing a story about the failure of the website is simply playing the spin game with a heaping dose of “I don’t know shit about what I speak of”.
Edit: I don’t mean you. I meant to say that I saw new headlines and editorials devoted to how much of a failure the site had been. I would be more concerned if it had been a success. That isn’t how software works – especially some cheap development done in an area that simply isn’t done. We’re not talking about a simple e-commerce site.
IT has grown much quicker than intellectual capital investments can keep up (ie: we’re hiring dumb people into IT positions).
Also, when people purchase web sites, it’s not like a cantelope you can heft and knock on. it’s just a table of options on a web page, which cognitive scientists show is just the worst way of making a decisions between different options. the purchaser just fixates on one thing they understand, usually the price, and go with that.
i don’t belive its a deliberate sabotage by the contractors who built the website infrastructure. I do believe there were prototypes along the development processes of the website where representatives from the contractor and the customer settled to specific deliverables of the project considering the budget. Just that dis-qualifies the contractor from being held liable.
Maybe it techniques and tools that are employed in the development of the website that jeopardize everything, but mind the techniques and tools were agreed by both parties in the contract. For sure users will flock the system at initial stage of its operation, by thus causing a hell lot of trafic on the server, as a result, slowering processing and delaying service.
Ofcourse one has to take blame, why because every project has got some risks attached while on the other hand project managers have to have plan B to avoid further damage into the economy. If they had forseen this then they would have settled for big budget for good system…
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