President Obama
was assured that the healthcare insurance website was ready to launch
on Oct. 1, even as private contractors and some administration officials
knew the site had failed in early testing, a senior White House advisor said Sunday.
Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer said the president
repeatedly asked about the healthcare.gov website, a key piece of his
2010 healthcare overhaul legislation, and was told it would meet his
expectations.
Along with the president, Pfeiffer hyped
the website in the weeks before the troubled launch, promising it would
“be a consumer experience unmatched by anything in government, but also
in the private sector.”
“We did believe that,” Pfeiffer said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Here’s our old friend Bruce Webster on the importance of testing:
You can’t inspect a software program the
same way you can inspect a house or a car. You can’t touch it, you can’t
walk around it, you can’t open the hood or the bedroom door to see
what’s inside, you can’t take it out for spin. There are very few
tangible or visible clues to the completeness and reliability of a
software system—and so we have to rely on [quality assurance] activities
to tell us how well built the system is.
Furthermore, almost any software system
developed nowadays for production is vastly more complex than a house or
car—it’s more on the same order of complexity of a large petrochemical
processing and storage facility, with thousands of possible
interconnections, states, and processes. We would be (rightly) terrified
if, say, Exxon build such a sprawling oil refining complex near our
neighborhood and then started up production having only done a bare
minimum of inspection, testing, and trial operations before, during and
after construction, offering the explanation that they would wait until
after the plant went into production and then handle problems as they
crop up. Yet too often that’s just how large software development
projects are run, even though the system in development may well be more
complex (in terms of connections, processes, and possible states) than
such a petrochemical factory. And while most inadequately tested
software systems won’t spew pollutants, poison the neighborhood, catch
fire, or explode, they can cripple corporate operations, lose vast sums
of money, spark shareholder lawsuits, and open the corporation’s
directors and officers to civil and even criminal liability
(particularly with the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley).
He didn’t know the real situation then. Why are we to believe he knows the real situation now?
For how much of his presidency has Obama known what was really going on? (Click link below to read more)
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