Uncle Bob on Heathcare.gov

Also, he makes dramatic points which have little to do with the problem. He describes the challenger problem, where a teacher's life could have been saved -- there were children waiting for that lesson! How is that relevant to what we're dealing with? I think it's a poor analogy only used for dramatic effect.

All this makes me feel the article as insincere and merely cashing in on the bad launch of healthcare.gov.

It is indeed very easy to write software that will later fail, and not know that it will fail while you're writing it. It's even very possible to have software that is failing, very publicly, and not know why.

Aside from levying blame here (which I think falls to management for having changed scope within weeks before launch), the thing that most people seem unwilling or unable to accept is that the website itself is a black box to a legacy government system. As with all black boxes, there's absolutely no way to know how it's expected to behave under load, especially when it seems that nobody ever got around to load testing it.

I would be very surprised to hear if there were those 'in the know' who could have scuttled the launch here because there wasn't any testing. Now, for sure, there very well ought to have been people saying "We can't launch without testing!", but even if there were people in that capacity, that would have surely seemed like fear-mongering, and could likely have gotten them cast as evil Tea Party members, given the public pressure (and political pressure) to launch.

Let's not forget that the alternative would have been to delay the effects of the law, which is a debate that shut down our government for a time. The outcome here, in my opinion, doesn't levy blame on the software industry, but at worst, on software industry within the government. That system is indeed very broken, and I think blame appropriated upon it is warranted -- even though systems do succeed in spite of it.

Wrong.

That "industry" had about as much to do with how real software is developed as an actor in a medical drama has to do with saving lives.

That industry was typical of the revolving door between corporations and government. Don't try to pin that train wreck on software developers like me: this is the work of politicians, clueless middle managers, and profiteers.

I don't know how you apparently got into my family, "Uncle Bob", but I want a divorce. Moron.