There are almost 10x more code in Healthcare.gov than Windows XP. A website vs a freakin’ OS. There’s about 8x more code in Healthcare.gov vs Facebook.com. Keep in mind Facebook.com does A LOT more than just signing up people and checking their eligibility. Also, keep in mind that for a similar scaled website like Healthcare.gov, it have around 25-30 million lines of code.
They used water fall methodology on something that isn’t well spec’ed out from day one. The developers who worked on the project saw steam coming out of the projects months ago. They said there were real test being done except by the government. There were requirement changes at the last minutes. When they tried to do a light load test, the system fail with just a few hundred users. So, yeah, those who knows software development knows all of the things they did is the recipe for disaster.