Along with the "tech surge" I heard Google and Oracle have volunteered personnel to help with the healthcare.gov site. hmmm this seems to violate Brooks's law which states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." So now time will be lost answering questions and bringing all these new people up to speed.
I read Obamacare came in at 500 million lines. what is the system doing that requires so much code? By comparison Windows8 came in around 80 million lines. So this system is really six times bigger and more complex?
I'd like to see the looks on the Google and Oracle developers faces when they see the Obamacare source code for the first time. Welcome to corporate/government IT!
I'm confident CGI already has a very deep understanding of agile. The probability that the issues can be traced to a lack of agile, or misimplementation of agile, is basically about zero.
A lot of the problem can be traced to the immovable deadline. If X million must be signed up by end of March 2014, then the site must go live no later than end of September 2013. So they went live because they had to and they obviously weren't ready or particularly close to ready. So it's just another big government IT project, late and over budget. But with the hard launch date there's nowhere to hide and no way to slip on the delivery.
It's easy to vilify CGI. To be fair, the go live deadline wasn't their estimate. It was Congress who dictated when the law was enacted that a 500 million line system would be built and ready in Z months - with apparently no consultation with the people who would build this system if this was realistic. CGI tried but it may have been an impossible mission.
