The Case of Healthcare.gov

Last Sunday, returning from the great 3rd Global Conference on Transparency Research held at HEC, Paris, I heard for the first time about  the Healthcare.gov case.

I was reading  the French newspaper JDD, when a news story caught my attention:
"De l'autre, Cheryl Campbell, dont la société CGI Federal a reçu près de 200 millions de
dollars (145 millions d'euros) pour développer et veiller au bon
fonctionnement du site. "Nous n'avons pas bénéficié d'assez de temps
pour tester le site, a-t-elle accusé. Seulement deux semaines.""

http://www.lejdd.fr/International/USA/Obamacare-tourne-t-il-au-fiasco-635832

I did laugh.

After the trip I went on to look at Slate; and look what it says: "Everyone at the
hearing, contractors and representatives alike, seemed ignorant of what
is demanded by this sort of testing, with the exception of Jerry
McNerney, D-Calif., a mathematics Ph.D. and ex-programmer. He asked
about such specifications for integrations. Campbell said, “There were
use-cases and things of that sort,” evidently unfamiliar with what
specifications are (hint: not use-cases). Slavitt said, “We believe we
received appropriate specifications.”"

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/healthcare_gov_problems_house_committee_hearing_is_a_spectacle_of_tech_illiteracy.2.html

No comments.

But there is more: "On his Friday call, Zients differentiated between
healthcare.gov’s “scale” issues and its “functionality” issues. I
believe this marks the first time that the administration has admitted
that healthcare.gov’s problems went far beyond the site being
overloaded. Zients said that account creation had now been fixed, with
more than 90 percent of users now able to create accounts. But only 30
percent have been able to complete an actual insurance application. And
that’s not even to say that the application is correct, owing to reports
of children getting listed as multiple spouses and the like."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/healthcare_gov_tech_surge_the_uninsured_are_now_unpaid_alpha_testers_for.html

I will comment about these paragraphs, soon.  They are good examples of the lack of proper Requirements Engineering.

Software Engineering for Helping Hospitals

In 2007, at the Monterey Workshop on Requirements Engineering I heard a talk by Lori Clarke, where she presented the number of “preventable errors in hospitals” as indexed by Jumbo Jet crashes.

In 2008 she and co-authors have published a paper at ICSE telling how Software Engineering technology could help tackling this problem. It is a must read. We understand that there is yet a lot that can be done from a software engineering perspective as to meliorate this catastrophe.

Clarke, in her paper, cites 1999 data, which were around 95K lost lives per year. Googling I found a number that is almost twice the 1999 one, by this site the number is 195k! Using the Jumbo metrics, it is like to say that 40 Jumbo Jet do crash per month (195k/400)/12!

Amazing.

Climate Change

Just found out the blog maintained by Steve Easterbrook on matters related to climate change. Professor Easterbrook has been studying how requirements engineering may help dealing with the huge problem of climate change, in special by providing modeling capabilities at a level of abstraction distinct from the models usually built by climate scientists.

Anyway, I am adding his blog to the Links bar.