IT experts: Healthcare.gov is still a mess

No question about it: Healthcare.gov is a wreck.

Early reports about the website being unresponsive and flaky came flooding in within the first few hours of the site going live. The most crucial part of the site, the sign-up system for the Federal Health Insurance Marketplace (FHIM), turned out to be the most problematic. What went wrong? Slate pointed out that one of the errors returned from the site hinted at an Oracle database problem, apparently because "the front-end static website and the back-end servers (and possibly some dynamic components of the Web pages) were developed by two different contractors." Another analysis by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, as seen in the Washington Post, came to a similar conclusion: The back end was the bigger culprit. He noted that adding server capacity probably wouldn't change anything. "It’s like you have four lanes in the highway converging into three lanes of a bottleneck," Jyoti said, "If your software isn't designed to reach all the lanes, that will happen." Source code for the site has since been published on GitHub -- it's built with Ruby and Jekyll -- but that repository does not include any of the actual data for the FHIM. As the Huffington Post pointed out, there's no development history for the code -- it's all been checked in as a single commit.

John Pavley at the Huffington Post felt that on looking at the code, the core of the problem was clear: The site was a rush job. Developers are already gleaning lessons aplenty from the failure. James Turner at programming.oreilly.com cited four major takeaways: do load testing; "pretty doesn't trump functional"; validation logic has to be, well, valid; and user experience is "a very precise art."