It's the Software, Stupid

A software expert talks about what went wrong with the ObamaCare rollout:

Most of the problems like these are in the software. Hardware is the easy part. You can add more hardware and do it easily. Software takes more time. In the rush of getting this out, it seems like testing wasn’t done completely. My expectations from this is that these problems should go away in the next few weeks. The site still won’t be as fast as something like Netflix, but it should work.

And then there’s this:

In sites like these there’s a very standard approach to capacity planning. You start with some basic math. Like, in this case, you look at all the federal states and how many uninsured people they have. Out of those you think, maybe 10 percent would log in in the first day. But you model for the worst case, and that’s how you come up with your peak of how many people could try to do the same thing at the same time.

Before you launch you run a lot of load testing with twice the load of the peak , so you can go through and remove glitches. I’m a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don’t buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.

They had three years to get this up and even just kind-of running, but unless I missed something over the weekend, nobody has yet been able to locate even just one person who has successfully bought insurance on one of these “exchanges.”