Obamacare website is fixed when they say it is

Obama administration is claiming that all will be fixed on the website by the end of the month.  Yeah right.  So what do we mean by "fixed"?   That it can process five individuals at once without crashing more than once a day?   Or that it stays up for days at a time while processing 100,000 individuals at once?  Wanna bet, no matter how flaky the website is, the Obamanauts will declare it fixed? 

Questions they ought to ask, but didn't

  Washington is grilling the Obamacare software contractors today.  Medium rare at least.  Someone should have asked about the specifications for the job. 
When was the final signed off specification released to the programmers?  Was the website user load specified?  Who signed off for the government?  How many change orders were issued AFTER the specification was released to the programmers?  Who signed off on the change orders?  How long was the specification?  Fifty pages is about right.  By the time you get to a hundred pages nobody understands it.  Who wrote the spec, government or the contractors?  What kind of contract was it, firm fixed fee, cost plus incentive fee, or plain old cost plus?  How many programmers did your company have on the job?  When did they start?  How much has your company been paid?  What milestones were set for payment?  What testing was required? Did the program pass those tests before Oct 1? How many lines of code were delivered?  Does the program run on Windows? 

Five million lines of code

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.