No, Uncle Bob, No – the Obligatory healthcare.gov Post

I tried to avoid this one. First of all, I don’t do politics on this site and this topic has way too much political baggage. Second, a great many people have already written about it, so I didn’t think I really had anything to add.

Then, Uncle Bob Martin chimed in.

I agree with some of what he has to say. I have no doubt that this particular debacle has harmed the image of software development in the eyes of the general public. Then he falls over the edge, comparing the launch of healthcare.gov with the Challenger disaster. After all, in both cases, political considerations overrode technical concerns. Regardless of this, Bob puts the blame on those far down the ladder:

Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you think this was a failure of government, or of management. Of course I agree. Government failed and management failed. But government and management don’t know how to build software. We do. We were hired because of that knowledge. And we are expected to use that knowledge to communicate to the managers and administrators who don’t have it.

The thing is, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is both a government agency and the system integrator on the healthcare.gov project. While there’s plenty of evidence of really poor code across the various parts, the integration of those parts is where the project fell down. Had the various contractors hired numerous Bob Martin clones and obtained the cleanest of clean code, the result would have still been the same.

Those with the technical knowledge and experience are, without a doubt, obligated to provide their best advice to the managers and administrators. When those managers and administrators ignore that advice, it is incorrect to allege that the fault lies elsewhere.

The end of the post, however, is the worst:

So, if I were in government right now, I’d be thinking about laws to regulate the Software Industry. I’d be thinking about what languages and processes we should force them to use, what auditing should be done, what schooling is necessary, etc. etc. I’d be thinking about passing laws to get this unruly and chaotic industry under some kind of control.

If I were the President right now, I might even be thinking about creating a new Czar or Cabinet position: The Secretary of Software Quality. Someone who could regulate this misbehaving industry upon which so much of our future depends.

Considering that all indications are that the laws and regulations around government purchasing and contracting contributed to this mess, I’m not sure how additional regulation is supposed to fix it. Likewise, it’s a little boneheaded to suggest that those responsible for this debacle (by attempting to manage what they should have known they were unqualified to manage) should now regulate the entire software development industry. For a fact, the very diversity of the industry should make it obvious that a one-size-fits-all mandate would make matters irretrievably worse.

Handing out aspirin to treat Ebola is just bad medicine.