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Software United States IT

FBI's New Info-Sharing Software Project Fails 271

Posted by michael from the you-lose-some-you-lose-some dept.
Spy Handler writes "After 4 years and half a billion dollars, FBI's attempt to create new information sharing software - called Virtual Case File - simply didn't work.
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FBI's New Info-Sharing Software Project Fails More

FBI's New Info-Sharing Software Project Fails

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  • Federal Cost Savings (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sgt O ( 832802 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:48AM (#11348496)
    To the Feds -

    Come look for me the next time you need something that does not work. I would be happy to deliver it for the bargain basement price of only $100,000,000.
    • It's projects like this that make me scratch my head and say WTF?

      Large organizations are only truely served by in-house developed software. The trick is for said organizations to hire folks who really know what they are doing.

      I can generally tell when a project is going to fail. The whole process begins with sending the project out for bid. For specific projects, yes, farm it out. There is no need to write your own relational database. If you don't have a Unix weenie in-house, it is cheap at twice the p

      • Large organizations are only truely served by in-house developed software. The trick is for said organizations to hire folks who really know what they are doing.

        Agreed. However, there is a mindset in a lot of government agencies that COTS and/or using consultants saves money - no matter how many times they get burned. In typical fashion, the article indicates the FBI ("I" for investigation) has hired two more groups of consultants to investigate the problem.

    • Sir,

      Your offer has been accepted. You are invited to become part of our Guantanomo Detainee Program (which currently does not produce intel or results).

      Please report to your nearest police station for arrest and processing. No personal effects allowed (as your living space is significantly restricted).

      Thank You
      FBI

  • Government software project fails?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pandion ( 179894 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:49AM (#11348505)
    Inconceivable!

  • Accountability (Score:5, Insightful)

    by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:49AM (#11348506)
    Since the attacks, Congress has given the FBI a blank check, allocating billions of dollars in additional funding.

    And that blank cheque is the problem. Whatever happened to accountability? It's the tax payers money to begin with.

    • Re:Accountability (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TyfStar ( 747185 )
      Whatever happened to accountability? It's the tax payers money to begin with.

      That's the problem right there. No tax payer has the time & money to do the auditing! I mean.. my portion of that was about $2. And I just don't have the time & energy to audit them for my $2.
      Can't I .. like.. hire someone.. to do it for me?

      What? I Do??

      Damnit! Okay, I revise this. It's because we can't kick government auditors out of office for not auditing my $2!

      Wait, can we?

    • Re:Accountability (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Odo ( 109839 )
      > And that blank cheque is the problem.

      Not always. NASA was given a blank cheque in the 60s to get a man to the Moon. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that NASA managed the project extremely well and there was very little waste. Contrast this with NASA's subsequent accomplishments once the blank cheque expired: decades of waste.

      Sometimes a blank cheque is just what's needed to get something accomplished efficiently. Apparently not in this case though.

      • Re:Accountability (Score:3, Insightful)

        by andreMA ( 643885 )

        Not always. NASA was given a blank cheque in the 60s to get a man to the Moon. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that NASA managed the project extremely well and there was very little waste. Contrast this with NASA's subsequent accomplishments once the blank cheque expired: decades of waste.

        The difference being, I think, is that for Mercury/Gemini/Apollo those working on it actually gave a damn and weren't solely concerned with self-enrichment. Then the disillusionment and cynicism of the 1970's

    • Re:Accountability (Score:5, Funny)

      by w1r3sp33d ( 593084 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:10PM (#11348776)
      "It's the tax payers money to begin with."

      Commie!

    • Re:Accountability (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Leebert ( 1694 )
      Whatever happened to accountability? It's the tax payers money to begin with.

      It's called "elections". They were in November. How many congressmen were voted out?
      • California's gerrymandering may be going out the window before the next major election in 2006. One way (through the Legislature) or another (through ballot initiative), redistricting seems like it's going to be removed from the hands of the Legislature and handed to an independent commission; the governor suggested a commission of retired judges, and members of California's congressional delegation are already moving to try to get themselves off of the list of districts to be decided by independent commis
    • "And that blank cheque is the problem. Whatever happened to accountability?"

      Basically, it means that the contracts go to whoever spends 70% of their money on accountability, auditing, documentation, oversight, and bureaucracy. (i.e. EDS [wikipedia.org]) Which is one of the reason government projects cost so much and are so likely to fail.

      There's nothing like a 12:1 beancounter to programmer ratio when you're trying to maintain accountability. No prizes for guessing how productive it is though.

  • Lemme guesss sum1 like EDS or Accenture was @ it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by betelgeuse68 ( 230611 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:49AM (#11348507)
    Having worked at Andersen Consulting little more than a decade ago and seeing the dismal IT failures of EDS has had in England, when I here of vast amounts of money wasted on failed IT projects these companies immediately come to mind.
    • I've found that there are no small failures in IT. You have your $400 "I bought the wrong part" and the $400,000,000 "we farmed out this major project and got crap" with very little in between.

      Burpie seed put all its eggs into a basket with a new inventory/sales/everything for everybody system. It didn't work. They lost a LOT of money in lost sales, on top if the bales of money that were burned on the project itself.

    • And the scariest thing is that they're looking to BAE Systems next. I have (well, had) family there for a while. If their experience is anywhere close to typical, this is not an organisation you want to help you run critical security/intelligence concerns.

  • Hey FBI. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by boaworm ( 180781 ) <boaworm@gmail.com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:49AM (#11348508) Homepage Journal
    Perhaps you should try this [bittorrent.com]?

    Hm, more seriously.. They must really have tried to make something special. Otherwise WebDAV+SSL would have proven to be a bit cheaper.. :)
    • They weren't looking for a file-sharing solution, or peer-to-peer system. They were looking for a distributed case management system, which is quite a different beast.

  • Sometimes Scrapping the System isn't a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by teiresias ( 101481 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:50AM (#11348514)
    From a position of a tax payer this frustrates me.

    However, as a programmer I can understand them wanting to scrap the program. If the design has been shot to hell, if their using technology several years past its prime, it's time to start fresh.

    And as a tax payer, I'd prefer the FBI to use a system that works, rather than a system that doesn't.
    • Not knowing details makes this an armchair quarterback post, but wouldn't they have been better served to have broken their IT needs down to a more granular level?

      Imagine the learning curve! Here we have this monolythic blob of stuff that can do EVERYTHING. Here are the 12 billion source lines of code and a make file that takes 3 centuries to run. The project is 4 years behind schedule and we fired the 10,000 coders that were working on it before, but we asked them to comment their code with nice flowe

  • In other news.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by FlimFlamboyant ( 804293 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:51AM (#11348523) Homepage

    ... The MPAA and RIAA have filed suit against the FBI, since their software could be used to share copyrighted material.

  • Even when they spend your money on collecting dirt on you, they STILL can't get it right. Sheesh.

  • Why do people need to reinvent the wheel? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Deekin_Scalesinger ( 755062 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:51AM (#11348529)
    I actually read the FA (Ok, scanned it), and I didn't see anything that the FBI required that isn't commonly available now. Get a robust DB, have information decrypted at the user's computer, do not have any portion of this network on the Internet - instead use VPN/SSH connections physically secure the boxes, etc. Why they went to a third party in SD who blew through 130 MILLION of our tax dollars with nothing to show for it is beyond me.
    • They probably chose the lowest bidder. The problem with "Lowest Bidder" systems, in my opinion, is just because the company puts in a low bid, doesn't mean that's what it actually will cost nor does it mean that the system will actually work.

      What the government should put into place is a "Middle Bidder" system. In theory, that should encourage contractors to put forward more reasonable estimates of the costs of projects.

      • Re:Why do people need to reinvent the wheel? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:22PM (#11348938) Homepage Journal
        In theory there's a guy involved in the process who reads the bids and rejects those that seem infeasible.

        In practice this guy is a manager, not a software expert, and he's usually an idiot. I've written dozens of proposals and it's monumentally clear that your job is to impress this idiot. Coming up with an intelligent design is something you spend time on after the bid, not before. And there's usually not time then, because you're busy fulfilling this idiot's pipe dreams.

        Not that I'm bitter or anything.

  • This sounds like a perfect project for the open source community! We should get Richard Stallman to submit a quote.

    Or better yet, Bram Cohen (inventor of BitTorrent) or Jed McCaleb (inventor of eDonkey). Those guys have experience writing file sharing programs after all, and isn't that really what the FBI is asking for?

    • No, it doesn't. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:30PM (#11349036) Homepage Journal
      One of the hardest things in working for government is that in order to write software properly, you need to get a good look at the data you're working with. You can't see this data; it's heavily, heavily classified.

      It's classified two ways: first, a lot of this data is privacy protected (the FBI spies on American citizens and that data is heavily controlled). Second, one of the things it needs to store is sources&methods, which are protected even more closely than the data itself. (The most classified stuff is always about sources&methods, not the data itself.)

      The open-source community could write pieces of it, but the hard work on a project like this is adapting it to the particular requirements of the customer.

      The problems involved aren't abstract ones that can be solved byu an incredibly clever person like Bram Cohen. They're involved in getting a gazillion people to all buy off on a data format, and convincing them that they really can share information without violating their security requirements (which is really just code-speak for "if I let you have this information I won't be the only one with it, and therefore I become less important.")

      The security clearance requirement means that they're working with a drastically reduced pool of programmers. Corners get cut, ideas go unused for lack of implementers, internal oversight is practically nil. (They have code reviews but they're an immense waste of time.)

      I'm not sure I've ever worked on a government project of even a tenth this size that I considered to be successful, even if it did get deployed. But throwing it out to the open-source community isn't an option.

      • Re:No, it doesn't. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by IndiJ ( 842721 )

        I disagree.

        ...in order to write software properly, you need to get a good look at the data you're working with.

        No you don't. All you need is a sample dataset that looks like the real data. Creating suitable simulation data and final testing with real data can be done by a small core of cleared personnel.

        ...the hard work on a project like this is adapting it to the particular requirements of the customer.

        Bullshit. That's overpaid consultant-speak. If the requirements are clear, they can be met. I

        • The requirements for these types of projects are almost always classified. The capabilities for these projects are almost always classified. The structure of the data, whether test or not, is almost always classified.

          If you're dealing with classified material, you have to be behind certified security protection, and no data can travel public lines, encrypted or not.

          An OSS model for this simply cannot happen for security concerns. OSS tools can be used, but they'll always have to be put together in a se

  • Ummmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by OECD ( 639690 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:52AM (#11348542) Journal

    From TFA: So far the overhaul has cost $581 million, and the software problems are expected to set off a debate over how well the bureau has been spending those dollars.

    I'm going to go with "not well."

  • The Kazaa approach. (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:52AM (#11348549)
    If the FBI had released its information encrypted as Metallica MP3 files, it would have been a resounding success.

  • A little political editorializing going on... (Score:5, Informative)

    by paranode ( 671698 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:53AM (#11348562)
    From the article:

    WASHINGTON -- A new FBI (news - web sites) computer program designed to help agents share information to ward off terrorist attacks may have to be scrapped, the agency has concluded, forcing a further delay in a four-year, half-billion-dollar overhaul of its antiquated computer system.

    The half-billion is entire their budget to overhaul computer systems, not how much money they spent on this software.

    This is not to say they haven't wasted any money:

    Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.

  • ... if it never sees the light of day?

    Seems like that's more along the lines of "planned" or "attempted".

    I could go for burning a half billion dollars in 4 years - where do I sngn up for their next try?

  • Time to move on (Score:2, Insightful)

    by muletool ( 234921 )
    Sometimes it best to scrap a software project and take the lessons learned from the failure to a new project. As long as knowledge was gained about why the project failed then not all was lost.

  • I have an idea! (Score:5, Funny)

    by af_robot ( 553885 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:55AM (#11348580)
    FBI can just post their information to usenet group gov.fbi.bigsecret and then use google to search for needed information!

    Now gimmi my half a billion dollars please! (I do accept paypal)!
  • I don't recall having any involvement with this project.

  • There was an article about things like this... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lpangelrob2 ( 721920 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:56AM (#11348589) Journal
    Someone at the FBI definitely should have read this article [slashdot.org].

  • Software too myopic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dartmouth05 ( 540493 ) * on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:56AM (#11348597)
    It is all well and good for the FBI to have information-sharing software, but the problem with compartmentalized information goes beyond merely agents within the FBI. What is truly neccesary is a system that would be used by many or even most investigatory Government agencies.

    When I worked for the Department of Justice, a case might have 5 different case numbers: one case number for the DOJ, one case number for the FBI, one case number for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, one case number for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, etc. If I only had the DOJ jacket number, it could take me 15 minutes to get the case number for another agency, just so I could talk to one of the investigating agents.

    Spend money to fix that larger-scale problem, before flooding the FBI with money to squander on a software application that they will be terminating and starting afresh on.

  • Waterfall. Genius. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:57AM (#11348605) Homepage
    The bureau is no longer saying when the project, originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2003, might be finished. ...

    A prototype of the Virtual Case File was delivered to the FBI last month by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. But bureau officials consider it inadequate and already outdated, and are using it mainly on a trial basis to glean information from users that will be incorporated in a new design.

    Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. ...

    A spokesman for Science Applications, Ron ollars, said via e-mail that the company had "successfully completed" delivery of the initial version of the Virtual Case File software last month.

    The stripped-down prototype will be running for three months. The bureau plans to then "shut it down, take all the lessons learned and incorporate them in a future case management system," a person familiar with the bureau's plans said. ...

    An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts said the agency's problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.

    Some sources sympathetic to the FBI defended the process, and said that what has been learned in designing the software has given the bureau
    valuable design and user information.

    The first time they saw the software was a year after the delivery date. So they must have been using waterfall. Then they defend the process by saying the only good thing they got out of it was the information for the next pass of iterative development. So the best thing about waterfall is that when it fails you can turn it into iterative. Pure genius.

  • Open the source! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Teun ( 17872 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:58AM (#11348620)
    The system as a whole might not work but as the article states there are salvageable parts in it for the FBI

    This is a prime example why public funded software ought to be open source, that way the community as a whole can pick bits and pieces out of it for further use.

    • I love the idea to open the source. So, how many open source developers out there would want to work on it? What about those outside the US?

      IANAA (I Am Not An American), but would gladly contribute to something that might actually help global security. A great many US citizens couldn't get a security clearance to work on the closed source code. How would you feel about foreign citizens writing code for your security?

      That said, even just opening the source for outside review would really help security.
    • it would be interesting if we could get them to release the code under the freedom of information act.
    • Ok, here ya go...

      @ECHO OFF
      COPY C:\FBI\*.* C:\HOMELA~1\ /s
      COPY C:\FBI\*.* C:\CIA\ /s

  • Perhaps using the Duke Nukem engine... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by flinxmeister ( 601654 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:58AM (#11348622) Homepage
    Perhaps using the Duke Nukem engine as a front end was a bad idea?

    Seriously, when you look around it's amazing how many software projects just completely fail with no usable code produced. It's not uncommon for companies to spend several million and just shut the thing down a couple years into it.

    I think we're about a century behind our technology. We still try to use industrial age models for 'building' things...and the digital/info/[buzzword] age has major implications that those models just don't take into account.
    • Like complexity that is orders of magnitude higher than any given physical object we built to date?
      • Like complexity that is orders of magnitude higher than any given physical object we built to date?

        Hmmmm....I don't know about that. A 747 is pretty complex. A skyscraper is pretty complex. I've seen plenty of art projects that are far more complex than at least one of these failed software project.

        Come to think of it, a CPU is pretty complex...and a CPU is a software development area. But in a CPU the physical design seems to keep things in a world that we can manage.

        Most of these software p

  • Fraud? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:00PM (#11348639) Homepage Journal
    If I sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, I'd be in jail for fraud.

    Why don't they do the same for software?

    These are the same feds who treat copyright infringement as "theft"; who tack on all sorts of costs to the cost associated with a breakin (where a kid just pokes around the system); and yet they turn the other cheek when these companies waste billions of dollars on badly-executed projects.

    As a taxpayer, I am thoroughly pissed at this waste of my money.

    Expect the Prime to pay a token couple of million dollars as a "fine" and walk laughing all the way to the bank...

    • Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SparafucileMan ( 544171 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:43PM (#11349190)
      Because it's possible to know that the car is busted in advance of the sale. The software issue is equivilent to the government giving you a contract for designing a new car from scratch. And if in the process of the designing the new car from scratch, not everything worked as forseen, that wouldn't be theft. Look at the defense industry. They get a contract for $X. Every few months or year the project is reviewed and if problems creep up, the Pentagon gives more money. If in the process they figure out that they're attempting the impossible, the Pentagon absorbs the bill.

      That's how it works. You can't ask someone to provide a bid for a thing that isn't designed or built yet, then throw them in jail if their bid isn't 100% accurate. Good luck finding bidders! Your analogy to a car is just fucking retarded.

    • If I sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, I'd be in jail for fraud.

      Why don't they do the same for software?

      But if you bought a car, you wouldn't be constantly harrassing the designers with new features ("It must be able to turn 90 degrees instantly! Oh, and I forgot to say I want it to fly!") while they were still building it.

      Rich.

    • Re:Fraud? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by poot_rootbeer ( 188613 )
      If I sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, I'd be in jail for fraud.

      Why don't they do the same for software?

      If you sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, it's probably because the order that the government placed with you was for a vehicle with an 80-gallon gas tank, that can use gasoline, diesel, compressed air, or vegetable oil and run equally well with each, that is no larger than a stationwagon and weighs less than 1000 pounds.

      The only way to meet those specs 100% is to

  • TIERS - Texas Integrated Eligibility Redesign Sys. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:00PM (#11348642)
    Sounds just like the TIERS Texas Integrated Eligibility Redesign System [state.tx.us] software my agency has been trying develop. The Texas Department of Human Services, now the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, has contracted to Deloitte to develop a web based system similar to what is described in the article. $3 million a month (according to some) has been spent on this for a couple of years now and it is a HORRIBLE excuse of a system. I know case workers that are being forced to test the software that say it takes at LEAST twice as long to work a case now than it did with the old system that was developed in the 80's. This has been a boondoggle in the worst sense and any Texas taxpayer should be pissed off about it.
    It gets to be depressing working for the government because you see so many contracts like this awarded simply because some higher up gets his palm greased. Another example of this is the fact that I had to pay Banctec (the company that has our hardware support contract) the standard fee of $340 to replace a CPU FAN in an old machine the other day. So sad.

    P.S. - I'm having to post this anonymously because anyone that has even begun to criticize the TIERS software, even internally, has been officially reprimanded or worse.

  • Gov't IT projects (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Lots of people are saying "How could they spend that much money on software that doesn't work". Clearly you've never worked on a government project. I'm working on one for a federal agency. We are migrating a small piece of a small department of this agency from legacy systems (mix of mainframe, access apps, excel spreadsheets, and 3x5 cards) to a J2EE solution. We are 4 years in with an average of 40 consultants at any given time. That alone is 16 million dollars, roughly, not including hardware and s

  • Not a software problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kerskine ( 46804 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:02PM (#11348667) Journal
    Just reading the article makes me think this was more a problem of trying to change the way the FBI works through software instead of making fundamental changes in the way they manage their people.

  • WikI FBI Pedia (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hhawk ( 26580 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:15PM (#11348850) Homepage Journal
    I guess a Wiki wouldn't work for them... Blogs wouldn't work either. A copy of the Code that runs SLashdog with heads of major field offices playing the Role of Cowboy Neal wouldn' work either..

    Ok, my point is now that they have a secure network there are some many great ways to share data, and even rank and Meta-moderate data...

    Sure it's nice to build some amazing wild system that totally solves every problem they ever had and ever will have... BUT there is too much risk.

    You see this happening again and again in Government, with FBI, IRS, etc. Big huge systems build from whole cloth rarely ever fit or work or are delivered as promised.

    Smaller systems with continual or incremental changes work better.
    • A Wiki setup seems perfect. According to the FA, they need something with "the ability for users to collaborate on documents and share information online."

      It seems that if they could expand Wiki to also display fingerprints and arrest warrents, then they're golden. Then just set up a good search engine on top of it, and there you go.

      I know, put a Google Desktop search on top of it, and run it off a Beowulf cluster...never mind.

      --LWM
  • Writen over 20 years ago by Fred Brooks, still a must-read for all software developers.

  • The companies that get awarded contracts like this are primarily good at writing proposals, great Power Point presentations, holding long meetings (at remote locations), performing requirements definition, alternatives analysis, white papers, security accreditation, various data gathering, data modeling, blah, blah, etc, etc. But rarely are they also good at the actual matter at hand. But I doubt there is anything a govt agency can do about this, since they require all that luggage to show accountabiity to

  • conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Adams4President ( 849082 )
    If it seems too impossible to bungle a project like this...it probably is. I'd bet the half a billion has been funnelled to some covert program.
  • That's a law in some states.

    I wonder if there is a federal equivalent.

    You don't just give someone half a billion and get nothing unless someone missrepresented what they were capable of.

  • Wasn't it the "Mythical Man Month" that said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "Plan to do it twice, because you're going to do it twice."

    Beyond a certain point, it's hard to completely pre-plan large IT projects. The only way to do them is to do large-scale mockups (aka the first attempt).

  • "The prototype's main feature allows users to prepare documents and forward them in a usable form. "

    This just in, the FBI invented email!
  • I know that many readers don't RTFA, but I'm surprised to know that even the news posters don't RTFA. It didn't cost half a billion dollars to create the software. According to TFA Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.

  • Ah! The joys of bureaucracy! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:28PM (#11349715)
    80% of government is fat.

    I'd like a nice on-line form associated with my tax return, which allows me to pick exactly where my tax dollars are spent.

    I'd tick off things like, "Sidewalks and road repair in the region of my choice."

    I'd tick off, "Public Transportation."

    I'd tick off, "Environmental Conservation" and "Well-funded Free Medical Clinics which employ doctors who really want to heal people and not just get rich." I'd tick off all the other things I want MY money to be spent on. I want to be able to micro-manage where my tax dollars go, what salaries people receive, and who gets to have a job funded with MY money.

    Things I'd NOT tick off would include,

    "Missile defense systems which A) don't work and B) increase world tensions leading to hugely wasteful expenditures on ever increasingly complex defenses. Which don't work."

    "Spineless Yes-Man Politicians More Interested in Keeping Their Jobs than in Serving the People who Bloody Voted for them."

    "Free Handouts and Make-Work Contracts for Stupid Corporations Which Don't Deserve Jack Shit, *cough Haliburton* But which Happen to be run by Friends and/or Family Members of Sitting Retard Presidents."

    "Education systems which make kids stupid, socially retarded and massively mis-informed."

    "Legal and Penal systems which put non-criminals into jails which are designed to shove everybody into beast-mode and encourage them to abuse one another just so that they might survive."

    And of course,

    "Half-Billion Dollar mis-leadingly named information-consolidation contracts which duplicate other contracts and existing systems which already work a bit too well at putting non-criminals into jail."

    If I can't have that tax system, then I'd rather see the whole goddamned thing burn to the ground.

    But hey, that's just me.


    -FL

  • Agile (xtreme) Software Development. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:35PM (#11349807) Journal
    The following quote illustrates the major problem I have witnessed with all software projects that fail:

    An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts said the agency's problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.


    When will people learn: with extremely complicated systems that humans have to interact with you can not specify it 100% correctly the first time?

    Experience in building such systems has lead many of us to realize you must use an iterative approach that allows the end users to be part of the feedback loop.

    Release early and release often, let your users use and break the application, and come closer to the ideal system with each iteration.

    Now, I wouldn't blame the FBI for the problem completely - after all, they are not software developers. A portion of blame should go toward the contractor for failing to realize the issues surrounding development of such a complex system and taking appropriate actions to determine and meet the needs of their clients. Their contract should have been written to a) specify customer satisfaction as the key measurable for success, and payment of the contract b) put in a rider that basically states any functionality needed to bring the application to minimal usability as discovery occurs will be part of the first contract (this is negotiable - some things are really enhancements and new functionality - and some are required, even though not originally discovered in the first iteration - this allows both parties to recognize up front that 100% discovery of requirements does not take place in practice).

    This approach has worked extremely well for me as a manager of vendor development (I have been extremely lucky to have vendors who understand what I am talking about), as well as for my own projects that I develop and implement. While there is a bit of risk involved in negotiating key usability issues discovered late in the development cycle - going out of the gate with an iterative approach ameliorates much of that - and is certainly less risky than giving someone $100,000,000 before I see the first line of code...

  • What's wrong with Napster? ;)
  • I always have to laugh when I'm watching 24 and they pull inter-agency databases up in a few seconds and send it to Jack's PDA in the field. To top it off, half the time the chick that is doing it is pretty hot.

    In the real world 1/2 the stuff he asked for would probably be on an old Unisys machine (not supported since 1989) that thinks it is dumping records to a printer that is actually an old OS/2 machine connected to the serial port running a Pascal program that was written by a summer intern back in 199

  • Another example of Cherry Picking? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jerry ( 6400 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:01PM (#11350170)
    During the 15 years I ran my own computer consulting business it was common to be invited to make a bid, do the analysis and present a proposal, only to have the analysis given to a another to impliment. Sometimes the connection was nepotism, sometimes it was a competitor who under bid, so the putative client thought they'd save money by using the low bidder. They "Cherry Picked" me. That happened only a few times before I realized what was happening and begin charging for the analysis. If they wouldn't agree to pay for the anlaysis I wouldn't submit a proposal.

    I am wondering if a similar thing isn't happening here. SAIC is, in effect, being paid to the system analysis, but the most lucrative part of the project will be given to an insider, a crony or for a political payoff.
  • Jeez, they should have just saved Napster the first time.
  • Some sources sympathetic to the FBI defended the process, and said that what has been learned in designing the software has given the bureau valuable design and user information.

    "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."(unknown)

  • Have trouble doing what everyone on the internet has been doing for years -- sharing files? Ridiculous!

    Cripes, give me the $100 Million. I'll set you up with a wiki and a google search appliance and I bet it'd work better than whatever shit their contractor came up with. My tax dollars at work. Grr.

  • ...work for government, and then you'll understand. Anyone beyond the level of 'prole' - that is, anyone with any sort of managerial responsibility - is likely to be a fucking idiot of the first order. The higher you go, the dumber they get, because promotion isn't based on ability but contacts and mutual secret-keeping. Who managed to get his 15-year-old babysitter to whore herself out to his boss? That's the person that's going to get promoted, be sure of it!

    I know it's a trite, overused stereotype,

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