"healthcare.gov" entries

You Can’t Legislate Away the Time, Money and Features Law

More Lessons from the Collapse of healthcare.gov

Last week, I wrote in some detail about some of the specifics of how the Federal healthcare portal seems to have violated basic principles of good software delivery. Now I want to talk a bit about the more general factor that I think led to all those cut corners and shoddy deliverables.

One of the oldest and shortest jokes in the computer industry is “Time. Money. Features. Pick any two.” To some extent, you can swap quality out for features, because poorly delivered functionality is essentially non-existent functionality. In almost all commercial software projects, time and money both end up being the parts that give in the end. In other words, the original feature set almost never gets cut, but the project goes over budget and delivers late.

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