One of the questions I have is why/how no one came to think of the back end issues at early stage of the development. (I assume a $350 mil project involves a lot of experienced people.)
I have seen some infographic on how large the code base is and at the beginning of the parent article, I thought the guy is going to argue that the code base is huge because they had to circumvent/workaround the back end problems.
"I assume a $350 mil project involves a lot of experienced people."
That's a safe assumption.
What's not is that the people calling the shots listen to them. We've seen mountains of evidence so far that they didn't.
E.g. CMS should have started integration testing of back end components and therefore issues long before the 1-2 weeks before launch, as testified to at the House hearings by representatives for CGI Federal, and more critically QSSI, which is responsible for a lot of those back end connections. Here's the latter guy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-panel-grills-co...):
"Andrew Slavitt, an executive vice president of Optum, said the testing did not occur “until the last few days.” He said that “ideally, integrated testing would have occurred well before that date.”
Pressed on how long in advance of the launch such testing should be done, Slavitt replied, “Months would be nice.”"
These contractors are experienced, they've seen it all before, including customers from hell like CMS.
Fortunately, as noted elsewhere, CMS is out, QSSI is now the integrator and the fix-it czar is saying the right sorts of things.
I have seen some infographic on how large the code base is and at the beginning of the parent article, I thought the guy is going to argue that the code base is huge because they had to circumvent/workaround the back end problems.