Per the NYT: "But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start... (October 12)

And from today (Oct 21): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-nee...

In a previous life I worked on similar software development projects at the US State level. This project was several orders of magnitude larger in scope and in complexity than what I worked on. Assuming a generous start date for Spring - say March 1 - this boils down to ~7 months to design and develop to the Oct 1 hard deadline. Nearly impossible in my opinion.

I'm not discounting that there couldn't be issues else where in whole process. These would include: communication overhead between all the various agencies and contractors, integration nightmares, and not enough skilled folks at Medicare to manage all of this. But having the requirements delivered several months before roll-out seems to me a recipe for disaster.

You don't need 100% final requirements to start building the system. If nothing else start working though the interfaces with other systems, and try and get as close as possible to a working prototype. Granted funding is often an issue, but even a tiny team given a few months head start can get a lot done.

On government contracts that's actually a problem. You can't bill for any work you did without 'authorization'. Which means you can't do anything until a finalized spec, signed in triplicate, is physically delivered to you.

I have wondered for some time now if it is legal to develop tools and libraries that are relevant to an upcoming contract, but which are also general purpose and could be used elsewhere.

Totally legal.

You just won't get paid for it.

Can they elaborate on what actually did happen? If I were your friends I would be trying to contact news agencies with corrections if at all possible because this is shaping up to be the highest profile government IT failure in US history.

Can you elaborate on what did happen?

> the interface kept asking me to reenter the information for our dependents. Farther on in the process it doubled the number of our children (to 6!) Even though it listed our children’s names twice (identically) and even though these clones had identical SS numbers, the validation software was not smart enough to realize that the duplicate records were describing the same people!

This didn't happen? Are you suggesting he made this whole story up?

The article, as the headline states, is about poor requirements dooming the project.

Well something happened. You might want to tell those guys that 500 million lines of code is a bit ridiculous.

I wonder what those LoC were for? XML parsing remote API calls between various disparate systems? Sounds like it's well beyond operation system complexity. Linux kernel is currently 15M LoC.

Then again, kernels and operating systems are quite logical and laid out by architects. Systems like these are rats nests defined by bureaucrats and integration nightmares.

You know what's cool? 1 billion lines of code.

I don't know if I would use the word propaganda...but speculation definitely fits the bill.