Healthcare.gov

[Train]

Ha, a bunch of federal contractors and subcontractors, Oracle, and Experian. What could go wrong?

So many Dilbert strips could apply here.

 

[plutoclacks]

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-09-25/
EDIT: In response to "So many Dilbert strips could apply here."

 

[beginner99]

I read on an article linked on reddit that it supposedly has 500 Million LOC! It's assumed these includes every legacy stuff it has to work with. I'm not from US but considering that were I live many regions have their own systems and so forth it isn't that hard to imagine if you have to interface with like 10'000 different legacy systems.

 

[Markbnj]

I read on an article linked on reddit that it supposedly has 500 Million LOC! It's assumed these includes every legacy stuff it has to work with. I'm not from US but considering that were I live many regions have their own systems and so forth it isn't that hard to imagine if you have to interface with like 10'000 different legacy systems.

Yeah I saw that too. That figure is ridiculous. 10x as many lines of code as Windows Vista? No wonder the damn thing doesn't work. This is the kind of info you get when you have journalists looking for stories and so-called experts who have no inside info speculating in return for their 15 minutes of self-promoting fame.

 

[Cogman]

In case it wasn't posted here

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

What gets me is that facebook including backend code clocks in at 61 MLOC, They are touting 500 MLOC. I just find that hard to swallow, that sounds almost like a stat that someone came up with to say "Look at how complex this system is, this is why it doesn't work!".

I mean, in comparison, the company I'm working at, which has been developing its software for over 10 years now, barely has 1 million lines of code. And yes, we do a lot of work with external sources, our job is essentially aggregating data from every bank or financial institution that a client deals, cleaning it up, and presenting it back to them in an easily consumable format.

And yes, we even have support for reports which follow government electronic reporting standards.

500 million lines of code? That is just crazy. In 4 years they spat out 500x the amount of code that my company has produced in 10 years. Sadly, some bureaucrats are going to think that is a good thing!

 

[veri745]

In case it wasn't posted here

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

What gets me is that facebook including backend code clocks in at 61 MLOC, They are touting 500 MLOC. I just find that hard to swallow, that sounds almost like a stat that someone came up with to say "Look at how complex this system is, this is why it doesn't work!".

I mean, in comparison, the company I'm working at, which has been developing its software for over 10 years now, barely has 1 million lines of code. And yes, we do a lot of work with external sources, our job is essentially aggregating data from every bank or financial institution that a client deals, cleaning it up, and presenting it back to them in an easily consumable format.

And yes, we even have support for reports which follow government electronic reporting standards.

500 million lines of code? That is just crazy. In 4 years they spat out 500x the amount of code that my company has produced in 10 years. Sadly, some bureaucrats are going to think that is a good thing!

It's so far out there, I find it pretty unbelievable. They are almost certainly including all of the systems in existence that anything related to HealthCare.gov has to interface with.

For all I know, that probably includes all the code in every state healthcare system, every hospital that reports health information, the entire IRS, and who knows what else.

If not, there's just no conceivable way that that much code could be generated since the law was passed.

 

[EagleKeeper]

They have been working on this for 3 years (1000 days)
That would be 166M SLOC/year

Say a decent (non AT type ) developer can generate 100 SLOC from requirements including testing per day. 0.1M lines over the lifetime

5000 developers on the project would be needed to hit the 500M mark.
Using a benchmark of 5 developers and 1 team lead per group you have roughly 900 teams.

Talk about a Tower of Babel in terms of coordination and integration.

 

[Markbnj]

If not, there's just no conceivable way that that much code could be generated since the law was passed.

Ha, interesting question. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law March 23, 2010. According to http://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html# there are 1316 days between that date and today. That means to produce 500m LOC would have required the production of 379,939 LOC per day since the law was signed.

Heh, Eaglekeeper beat me to it.

 

[Train]

I'm pretty sure they are counting the lines of a bunch of dependencies.

Saw a screen shot floating around twitter of the HTML showing they included jQuery, MooTools, BackBone, and possibly even angular.js at various places, all uncompressed, could easily be several million if you include all of each (jQueryUI for example)

Hilarious they couldn't even get all the teams down to a single JS library. In very rare cases does a site ever need to use more than one. 4 or 5? That's just inept project coordination. And that's just the front end. How many redundant libs are on the back end?

And knowing the code-pumping kind of companies this was all sub-contracted out to, there was probably heavy use of code generators. There could be a few million lines of boilerplate that isn't even used.

 

[Markbnj]

I'm pretty sure they are counting the lines of a bunch of dependencies.

Saw a screen shot floating around twitter of the HTML showing they included jQuery, MooTools, BackBone, and possibly even angular.js at various places, all uncompressed, could easily be several million if you include all of each (jQueryUI for example)

Hilarious they couldn't even get all the teams down to a single JS library. In very rare cases does a site ever need to use more than one. 4 or 5? That's just inept project coordination. And that's just the front end. How many redundant libs are on the back end?

And knowing the code-pumping kind of companies this was all sub-contracted out to, there was probably heavy use of code generators. There could be a few million lines of boilerplate that isn't even used.

What's the realistic chance of getting to 500m lines even if you include all the dependencies you can possibly include? I think it's a completely bullshit number.

 

[Train]

What's the realistic chance of getting to 500m lines even if you include all the dependencies you can possibly include? I think it's a completely bullshit number.

500m seems hard, no doubt. I also suspect they are counting lines of comments, config and docs.

Or it's just flat out BS

 

[Ken g6]

Or maybe they took the size of all the files, in bytes, and divided by 80 (columns)?

 

[mjd]

Maybe it's 1 million LOC replicated across a production cloud of 500 machines!
It's a poor metric - and yeah, when put into the hands of the laymen press, who knows how badly it's been polluted.

-M

 

[ForumMaster]

dealing with peak demand is, and always will be a problem. frankly, having amazon be the backend might not have been a bad idea. you know it will work.

an interesting blog of how twitter survived a peak of over 143,000 tweets per second

in order to handle the amount of traffic that some sites see today, these technologies that twitter use for example are the only way.

healthcare.gov otoh, will probably only have a peak of traffic for the first couple of month. perfect for the cloud...

 

[EagleKeeper]

dealing with peak demand is, and always will be a problem. frankly, having amazon be the backend might not have been a bad idea. you know it will work.

an interesting blog of how twitter survived a peak of over 143,000 tweets per second

in order to handle the amount of traffic that some sites see today, these technologies that twitter use for example are the only way.

healthcare.gov otoh, will probably only have a peak of traffic for the first couple of month. perfect for the cloud...

Those first 3-6 months are critical.
It makes or breaks the overall functionality of the ACA