Fox News just reported that the Obamacare website contains five million lines of code. Wow. Old rule of thumb, a programmer can produce 10 lines of code a day. So, five million lines of code, is 500,000 mandays, or 2000 man years. ie, one man for 2000 years, 2000 men for one year, or any combination in between. Wow. We know they only spent a year or so on the job. Which means a 1000 man project at least, which is a night mare. To get any good out of 1000 programmers, you have to divvy up the job into 1000 pieces, and give each man one piece to code. In order for the 1000 pieces to work together, you have to write a spec for the inputs and outputs of each piece. That's a 1000 specs. And then someone (a small army actually) has to make sure that the output specs all match the input specs and vice versa.
Let's see, a manyear costs at least $100,000 for experienced programmers, so 2000 manyears is only $200 million. The TV news says Obama spent $632 million on the job. I wonder where the other $400 and some million went.
Incidentally, five million lines of code sounds awfully high. Like maybe made up by newsies. Just as an off-the-wall guesstimate, ( my day job used to be estimating this kinda thing ) I would think 100,000 lines of code would be plenty to do health insurance signup.
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