MediaMaster wrote on Jan 19
th, 2014 at 1:21pm:
Some of those numbers are pretty interesting. For instance, why the hell would an HD-DVD player add-on for the XBox require 5 million lines of code? This makes me happy I'm a hardware guy and not a developer. Poor bastards...
The 500 million lines of code for HealthCare.gov shouldn't be shocking. If you've ever worked on an application developed by federal contractors, you'll quickly find out what kind of bloated crap comes out of those contracts.
Contractors are often undercut by their competitors every couple of years, so the entire development team is dismissed and replaced by others. A portion of the people that actually do the work are often hired by the new contractor, but this isn't always the case and the number of people brought onboard the new contract can vary.
Imagine playing a video game that was developed by three different teams that were swapped out with only a week or two of warning. The old team is getting dismissed, so they have no incentive to turn things over gracefully. Thus, the new team has limited documentation and their customers to rely on to get up to speed. What kind of game do you think would come out of that development process? The same logic applies for the crap the government buys.
I read an interesting OpEd piece that opined the flaws with the development of HealthCare.gov. First and foremost, the acquisition went through the typical federal purchasing cluster!$%@ that guaranteed it would be won by a major government contractor (e.g. Northrup Grumman, Deloitte, etc). The private sector would likely have engaged a proven web 2.0 company that used proven talent from companies like Twitter, Google, FaceBook, etc. Instead, we get a bunch of contractors that have absolutely no idea how to develop a public-facing application that would be used by millions of people simultaneously.
Anyway, that's the end of my rant. If you like data represented with a bit of eye-candy, I recommend checking out the "Data is Beautiful" subreddit here:
https://pay.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/ They have some truly amazing stuff there.
-b0b
(...thanks for sharing!)
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