The politics of software

This fall, as healthcare.gov imploded before our eyes, we saw any number of self-proclaimed experts chime in on why it coughed, sputtered, and ground to a halt, and how, exactly, it might be fixed.  My guess is that the answer is more complicated than most of them let on, but I'll bet there's a healthy dose of politics mixed in with whatever technological, security, and requirements issues might have surfaced along the way.

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It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to talk about politics at all in the context of software development, of course.  One of the aspects of software that really appealed to me when I entered this field was that for most problems, there existed an actual correct answer, and there are no politics in algorithms.  Ah, to return to the halcyon days of simple problems and discrete solutions!

Today's problems are more complicated than ever before, though.  Prodigious capabilities have bred complex systems and murky requirements under the best of circumstances, and no government project operates under the best of circumstances.  For those of you in private enterprise, you surely are aware of the struggles bred of competing interests and limited resources, but in a government setting, all those factors explode.  Funding is rarely connected directly to stakeholders, opinions are everywhere, and "deciders" are nowhere to be found.   Not to put too fine a point on this, but if we were to think of government-sponsored software as having been congealed rather than developed, we might be on the right track.  It's actually a small miracle when these systems work at all, given the confluence of competing forces working to rip projects in seventeen directions at once.

Think back for a moment on the early days of Facebook or Twitter or any of the other massive applications that serve as today's benchmarks of reliability.  They weren't always so reliable, of course.  Twitter, in particular gave birth to a famous "fail whale" meme in 2009 as it sorted out its capacity and reliability issues.  To be clear, twitter operates on a huge scale, but all it's doing is moving 140-character messages around -- there isn't a whole lot of business logic there, short of making sure that messages get to the right person.  It's pretty easy to gloss over some of those growing pains, but virtually every large system has them.  In the case of healthcare.gov, the failures happened under the hot lights of opening night and amid opponents who wanted desperately to see the system fail, and fail hard.

If you work amid politics like this, I'd love to offer a simple solution, but sadly, I have none.  Instead, I'd urge a little empathy; walk a mile in the footprints of developers, project managers, analysts, and testers on projects like this before you criticize too vigorously.  I can assure you that if you think this was a failure with a simple cause, you're mistaken.

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