The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol 345
MrMetlHed writes "A portion of this Reuters article about the Pentagon's inability to manage paying soldiers properly mentions that their payroll program has 'seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated.' It goes on to mention that the documentation has been lost, and no one really knows how to update it well. In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful."
Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Funny)
But - but - cobol is supposed to be self-documenting!
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Funny)
But - but - cobol is supposed to be self-documenting!
TL;DR
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the source code is usually fairly legible, but at 7 million lines the spaghetti factor is likely pretty high.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Insightful)
In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful.
Translation: the pimps deployed highly effective counter measures to shock and awe the client, the result was a resounding victory of "extended" contracts!
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Interesting)
We did flowcharts in Basic and Fortran, but COBOL was IPO charts (Input, Process, Output) and module diagrams for us; oh we did psudeocode of the modules, psuedocoding COBOL is really tough because cobol is so wordy.
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" As for the 7 million lines of code, exactly how much of it is actually active?"
That's the multi-billion dollar question, now isn't it?
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For every line of active duty Cobol code, there are seven support lines behind the front.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Funny)
Seven million lines of COBOL might only be a short sorting routine.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm no fan of COBOL (and enjoyed Dijkstra's criticism), but its main flaws are not to do with being verbose. "Hello World" is longer than it would be in most languages, though a lot of that is just overhead; in general the line count in COBOL is not massively bigger than in other languages. Of course, the syntax in each line can be a mouthful, with an excessive use of keywords obscuring the structure, but in coding business logic this is not always a disadvantage (business logic is often convoluted anyway,
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Have you seen Cobol? It takes several hundred lines to write a "Hello World" program. 7 million lines of Cobol can probably be replaced by 70 lines of Perl (at the expense of any possibility of anyone ever reading it).
Hello World isn't so bad
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'Hello, world'.
STOP RUN.
Even Hello, OS/360 circa 1972 is
001 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
002 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'.
003 ENVIRONMENT DIVI
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Well the source code is usually fairly legible, but at 7 million lines the spaghetti factor is likely pretty high.
You assume the source code was still available.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Insightful)
The claim that the documentation "vanished" seems bogus. Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal staff turnover and one building move would probably stand a good chance of taking care of it.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point, but I doubt it was maintained very well by the people who edited that codebase over the decades.
I also doubt they fired any of them unless they were contractors...you have no idea how ugly the federal workers union is about things like this. They almost can't lose their jobs through incompetence or anything else. Which brings me to the problem...the people who wrote it probably wrote half-assed spaghetti code, didn't document it well, and then died off or retired. No one is learning cobol anymore, so you get what we've got right here.
Plus...trying to replace any system in the government or military is an extremely painful exercise that probably fails more often than it succeeds. Between the people you need to deal with, and the policies you need to dance around...it's almost impossible to stand a new system up. (Unless you have someone in a high place that really gets it, and champions the hell out of it...and even then, it's iffy.)
I was a defense contractor for 4 or 5 years. It was quite a few years ago now. Left that behind, and I don't miss it.
Cobol really is self-documenting (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code." One of the reasons that COBOL is such a verbose language is that it was designed so that bean counters with no programming experience could audit the source code and understand it well enough to make sure that nobody was stealing anything. Not only that, it's rare that COBOL code actually needs any comments because the variable names are long enough that you shouldn't ever have to guess what any of them are used for or what's being done with/to them.
As far as spaghetti code goes, that can be a problem, especially in very old code, from before such things as structured programming were conceived. And, there's even a statement, "ALTER," which allows you to create self-modifying code, although even back in the '80s when I learned it in school, we were warned never to use it.
Re:Cobol really is self-documenting (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code."
While it's true that COBOL is meant to be self documenting, there is, in a 7 million line project, a difference between understanding any particular section of code and being able to comprehend the entire structure of the project. If that structure is undocumented, you will have a lot of reading before you grasp the program globally. Apparently the "failures" that were being experienced were not leading the maintainers to the appropriate sections of code and such a global understanding had become necessary.
I know it breaks one of the cardinal rules of software development, but if you have a cool billion to throw at the problem and the existing mess cannot be fathomed, perhaps starting afresh is an idea ...
Re:Cobol really is self-documenting (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, except that you'd have a period at the end, not a semicolon. (This is why statements in COBOL are referred to as "sentences.") However, if you did try something like that in a shop where the bean counters were auditing your code, they'd probably reject it for lack of clarity and insist that you gave that variable a more meaningful name. If you really want to, you can obfuscate code written in any language, but it's probably harder to get away with in COBOL than in most other languages.
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Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point, but I doubt it was maintained very well
That may well be because any decent COBOL programmer knows (or knew) that the code itself is indeed self-documenting. COBOL code may be tedious to write (actually, it certainly is) but it has the advantage of being quite easily maintained.
So, no excuses. It's more likely the US Govt is too cheap to hire anyone with the appropriate skills. It's also quite possible that an age bias has been applied by their HR bozos, thus excluding that generation most likely to be good at this work.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhhhh...no. COBOL has a GOTO. Legacy COBOL has a tendency to use the GOTO a lot. In legacy COBOL, all the variables are global (although you did at least have to declare them all). These things do not make for easily maintained code.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Informative)
Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.
Being the spouse of some one who works for a Gov. entity (her) AND being in IT (me), its far more likely that the the engineers who created the system(s) have long since retired. Fed workers rarely get 'fired'. And interestingly its more likely that the system was documented to a much higher degree than you would think; there are entire fed. departments devoted to documenting things and creating requirements documents. The problem is once the process is documented and archived, those same sad COBOL systems are used to process the records that describe the location of the documentation
Re: Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Funny)
Those tapes got wiped when the magnetic alien was stored too close.
Re:Cobol is self-documenting (Score:4, Funny)
The claim that the documentation "vanished" seems bogus. Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.
I think the truth is probably much simpler than that. Someone dropped the card deck containing the documentation, and they never managed to sort it back into the right order.
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"The claim that the documentation "vanished" seems bogus. Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody."
I agree with the latter, but that still means the documentation did "vanish". It just doesn't address why.
I think the money would have been better spent simply replacing the Pentagon and all its staff. The new one can be 5-sided, too. But they should build it in Montana and staff it with locals. It's cheaper. They'd probably win more wars for us too.
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Hughes would compartmentalize documentation on how to manufacture everything. There software had similar fragmentation in the source code. To collect all the documents would require having access to the root document which would then lead to the first level. Then would come tertiary and quaternary levels. There is NO centralized list of all the documents needed, you MUST parse every sheet of paper.
I recall one gasket for a keyboard for some aircraft system they'd installed in the mesozoic era. When Raytheon
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Maybe at the level of modules or minor subsystems, but with software systems that large you would still want architecture documents and data definitions as a minimum.
COBOL is self-documenting (Score:2)
At least that's what my old B-school roommate told me.
Re:COBOL is self-documenting (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but every line is documented the same way, "don't touch this because I don't know what it does but sometimes it works".
Typical government efficiency... (Score:3, Interesting)
a billion dollars to replace an antiquated program and the project fails. This is why our military is the most expensive in the world, and why I've argued for years that comparing military spending between nations is only apples to apples if each nation is competently spending what they are given.
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen this happen with lots of "let's replace this antiquated software" projects. There's alot of trust put into hiring someone to do this properly. Usually the people writing the check don't know enough about software architecture or requirements gathering to foresee that the contractor is going about it the wrong way and dooming the project to failure. Or administration that isn't open to the concepts that must be embraced to move from paperless to electronic, etc. So many ways for something like this to fail terribly. Only time I've seen it succeed is a combination of competent leadership of the software development combined with the administration trusting the judgement of the software developer when it advises on process changes that will need to be implemented. Rarely do you get both of these things together, and when you are missing one then it's a disaster.
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I've been technical lead and technical contributor on numerous such projects, it's an absolutely core part of my work. And it is incredibly difficult in large environments, where numerous groups have evolved distinct usage and workflows and are often very resistant to change. Coupled with the amount of money being managed in this project, and the military and security requirements, such a project is well beyond the capabilities of any group I've ever met.
Trust is not a sufficient factor, I'm afraid. Compet
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Added to this, people often have the misconception that just because something is "old" it is less complex than the current requirements. In reality, all that COBOL was written to perform the same function on severely limited hardware that they now want to accomplish on a simple server system -- and I bet the data and processing requirements both then and now are astronomical. The end result is that whoever is doing the new system is likely pitting themselves against whatever the brightest minds of yesteryear were able to produce, and it won't be simple. That old system had time to be fine tuned, and the protocol built up over the years is designed around the precise quirks created by the system. Thus, the entire architecture and ALL related protocol has to be re-examined prior to architecting a replacement system -- and I doubt the winning bidder was even asked to bid on that, especially in a military organization.
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This reminds me of the odd undocumented workaround processes that always seem to creep into the work habits of the users of some complex systems. It is almost impossible to catch those when gathering requirements because they never formally exist.
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COBOL [wikipedia.org] is a high-level language that had the first compilers in 1960 running essentially the same program on both RCA and UNIVAC computers. Usualy some changes may have to be made in the CONFIGURATION SECTION. but other than that the compiler and the Operating system takes care of it. The problems I'd imagine happening is some of it is written in pre-ANSI COBOL 68, most in ANSI COBOL 68, a fair amount in COBOL 1974 and a smattering of COBOL 1985; so a lot can depend on how strict the compiler is. I imagine e
Re: Typical government efficiency... (Score:3)
There is no "off the shelf" product that is going to handle payments to Civil War survivors and the 160 years of federal laws passed since then for paying soldiers/survivors their wages in every war since.
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Well said.
Likewise, to fly a 747 one need only push and pull the stick a bit, to perform a heart transplant one need only know what to cut and what to stitch, and to cure cancer one need only know what atoms to stick together.
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I think that is correct. There is also the fact that until very recently many of the major powers, and major regional powers, were still mainly using conscription to fill their armies. It makes a bit of a difference when you are paying your soldiers market rates for their labors instead of what you would pay conscripts. You also have the factor of first world cost structures versus third world costs. Last time I look at some data within the last few years, an American corporal (1 step above the highest
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Apples to apples is always a good comparison, but exactly what military are you saying is more efficiently run? The US military may waste more money per year than the GDP of some small countries, but it is probably not the most proportionally wasteful military out there.
It's also important to note that as the mission of the military becomes more expansive, there is a lot more room for waste. If you're running the military of say, Luxembourg, you might be able to keep a tighter leash on it, not just becaus
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've maintained legacy payroll software (Oracle RPT, predates PL/SQL) and have been marginally involved in migrating clients to the new shiny payroll system. Generally it fails where the client wants the new system to behave exactly like the old system.
The new system usually can handle the required business rules (or it's not too much work to make this happen) but all the processes around those rules are different. eg the new system needs to generate report RW200 to lineprinter 6, daily at 6PM and must be formatted just so (no one reads the first 1000 pages, but the summary page is critical to some obscure business process.)
So, the new system has to print unformatted ASCII to a serial line printer, in an obscure way, on nonstandard paper, that's hard to replicate in a modern report writer. Never mind the already written, laser printed, on-demand reports (or emailed, or exported to excel or whatever) have the same information - it's NOT THE SAME - our users will be confused so it MUST BE CHANGED!.
Rinse and repeat for basically everything else in your system and you've heavily modified your new system to behave just like your old payroll system (and killed any performance improvements, worked out all the bugs etc again). because it's so heavily modified you're basically on a unique version of the new system that only certain programmers really understand. Ant they're going to retire / leave because the project was so shit to work on.
Add the usual government oversight/waste and you've blown a billion dollars. (that's impressive though, I have to say.)
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is less of a "government efficiency" issue than it is a "contracting" issue.
Imagine you have a gigantic system like this that you need to replace. So you want to hire someone to build the replacement. You can't just go give $1B to company X and say "I'll see you in five years when you've built me a new pay system" - the taxpayers (and their representatives) would never go for that. Instead, you first go build a set of requirements that such a system must meet and then you award the contract to build the system to the company that convinces you that (a) they'll build the system that best meets those requirements and (b) they'll do so in a cost-competitive way (if not cheapest, then close to cheapest).
Therein lies the crux of the problem - building large complex software systems over multiple years "to spec". In short, it can't really be done:
I've only ever seen one model work successfully (in my time in the USAF and as a contractor):
The above system works beautifully. And Congress, contractors, and contracting agencies within the military hate it. Which is probably why it isn't done more often.
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I think your understanding is flawed. They already have competing priorities and don't get enough money to fund them all. In comparing the US and China, remember that the US pays everybody a lot more than China does. An American corporal is paid about as much as what a Chinese is paid. You may also want to keep in mind that defense spending as a portion of GDP has fallen from about 38% of GDP in 1945 to about 4-5% today. Spending for social welfare programs is about 2x what is spent on defense.
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
defense spending as a portion of GDP has fallen from about 38% of GDP in 1945 to about 4-5% today
Comparing current spending to WWII spending is either disingenuous or just plain silly.
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Comparing the world-beating Nazi military & engineering structure to some guys in caves who arguably aren't even an actual organization is lunacy.
But fine, let's use your "real war" coffins as a metric. U.S. military deaths in WWII: 416,800. U.S. military deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan combined: 4,409+2,200 = 6,609 (source: Wikipedia). Using the military GDP numbers from upthread, we have GDP-Percent-Per-Coffin values:
WWII -- 38/416800 = 0.00009
Post 9/11 -- 4.5/6609 = 0.00068
So by your "real war" meas
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The true indecency was the attacks against innocent people by al Qaida - they killed and wounded thousands of people before the US became truly committed to fighting them. There is no shame in calling the war what it is. It isn't a witch hunt. There have been hundreds of arrests and convictions for terrorism related offenses in the US. There have been thousands and thousands of terrorists killed or captured abroad. The reason the day to day threat to American lives appears to be low is due to the effec
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Considering our GDP is about $15T, I'm calling complete bullshit on your 4-5%. That would mean spending is $600-700B. It's actually twice that.
Not that the government *has* $15T to spend. They have about $5T in taxes, roughly 25% of which is spent on military.
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure where you got your numbers from, but you may have a couple of items swapped.
In 2012, the US federal government spent $3.56 trillion dollars, with revenues of $2.44 trillion, and a deficit of $1.12 trillion.
Entitlement spending was 61.9%, and defense spending was 18.7% (~ $677 billion).
You can find that data here: Federal Spending by the Numbers - 2012 [heritage.org]
You can see the long term trend of defense versus entitlement spending here [heritage.org].
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You are quoting the heritage foundation, which has a specific agenda. If you don't know what it is then that is your problem.
How about I quote the war resisters league, where they claim 47% [warresisters.org] of the government spending is military related.
The difference between the two numbers is, what one considers military spending, and what considers government spending in general. For example, is the NSA's gigantic surveillance military spending (it is after all part of the "defense department")? How about the pension pr
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The government doesn't create the GDP, but it does tax economic activity reflected in the GDP and various types of wealth. The government uses taxes to get the money it spends. The tax burden imposed by the government on the economy may be represented as a percentage of the GDP. Maybe you've seen some faulty discussions of the issue in the past, but it is a fairly common way of describing the burden of government and taxes on an economy, and on society. That isn't a claim that the government creates the
Re:Typical government efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
ca hit something like this (Score:2)
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/21/local/la-me-state-computers-20121222 [latimes.com]
Everyone's pay get screwed up (Score:5, Informative)
Army in the 90's
Everyone's pay gets screwed up at least once, then. Uncle Sam takes it back
Mostly minor things like an allowance like jump pay being paid while not on jump status
Corruption (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like corruption. If you can't wrangle up a team of coders and project managers with a billion dollar carrot, then there is something terribly internally wrong with your process.
it's the old data and all the linked systems (Score:2)
it's the old data and all the linked systems and with 40 year old systems just importing data is not easy.
And even if are able to import that can be loads of work around / place holder names / fake names (uses for workarounds or even temp holding of data) and so on.
Some stores do use names like MR cash for cash sales so there may all kinds of fake names in the system as well.
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I do data processing from rubbish sources (people who can't follow specs) every day.
Its a pain yes but not actually that difficult. Everything you just described takes time but it certainly isn't impossible to do.
Import data, find differences, fix mistake and repeat until it is working well.
How did the military pay during WW2? (Score:5, Insightful)
They had way more soldiers back then today, and payroll did not seem to be a problem. Maybe the Pentagon should go back to using whatever system they had back then.
now there are multitude of pay levels. (Score:4, Informative)
There is basic pay, plus “entitlements” for everything from serving in a combat zone to housing allowances to re-enlistment bonuses. An individual’s pay can change several times in a day.
likely the old software can't deal with all of that to well.
http://www.informationweek.com/government/state-local/outdated-it-blocks-california-payroll-or/225702383 [informationweek.com]
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Sounds like software can't cope with a bad process. Maybe we should throw out the process instead of trying to improve the software?
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They should optimize their process and then rewrite their software to match it, using modern languages with proper decoupling of all the various calculations. Replacing the old system will only be difficult if they base it on the existing software, which is most likely the usual tangles mess of poorly written COBOL. The sad part is that defining the full requirements is actually pretty difficult in itself.
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There is basic pay, plus “entitlements” for everything from serving in a combat zone to housing allowances to re-enlistment bonuses.
Was it that different in WWII? I don't know the details, but there were definitely things like combat pay. Yet they handled it all with paper (and maybe some punch card machines). As the old line goes "to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer".
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Pay changes/enrollments should just be data, not lines of code. Can't imagine even the most green of developer would screw up that bad.
It really does not take 7M lines of code to do this. ( will be a huge database, but not code base )
but that old code had to fit into 80 columns and (Score:2)
but that old code had to fit into 80 columns and other really limits
Re: How did the military pay during WW2? (Score:2)
Ww2 they didn't have all the allowances they have today. That's where the screw ups come in. Not base pay
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They had way more soldiers back then today, and payroll did not seem to be a problem. Maybe the Pentagon should go back to using whatever system they had back then.
A ton of staff, all drawing paychecks. Back then employees were assets. Now they are expenses to be avoided.
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Hard tack and a ration of rum?
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My dad was in charge of Payroll at Ft. Hood during the late 1960's while he was drafted. (he was a private with BA in Accounting and ran the department because the LT screwed up the Col's pay one too many times). They figured pay vouchers a lot by hand, but processed even back then via a Mainframe, usually at night. Then they would dispense the pay in cash those days. It was a nightmare even back then, often times requiring a lot of manual calculations.
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Not true. Payroll software is amazingly complicated. And every year all the laws change so that you have to update it. It's constantly in flux. Federal, state, county, and sometimes even city laws to cover all the employees you have, plus of course foreign laws if you want to incorporate that into a single payroll department. That's why most places outsource this stuff. It's a huge expense to do it yourself and economies of scale make sense to have entire companies devoted to just that one job.
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That's why most places outsource this stuff. It's a huge expense to do it yourself and economies of scale make sense to have entire companies devoted to just that one job.
Maybe the Pentagon should outsource to them then.
Can't read the article (Score:5, Funny)
I tried to read the article, but it was written in English - a decades-old language.
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Centuries, but it is being continuously updated.
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They do have documentation though. Kids are also forced to RTFM while in school. It kinda helps.
Quick Books MIL (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind taking this one on. Sure it's already been done, but I'm sure they'd pay to have it done again.
My only stipulation is that I'd want to do it all myself with just one business analyst and one quality control tester.
I think I could manage it in 3 years at 3 million dollars. However I'd probably cause the loss of 10,000 jobs so its probably not going to happen :)
Expecting too much (Score:3)
Redundant (Score:2)
If they were updated, they wouldn't be in Cobol.
Re:Redundant (Score:4, Funny)
Also, seven million lines of COBOL is about what it takes to write a Sudoku solver in COBOL.
4.8 LOC per person (Score:5, Interesting)
The code base is so large that its ~4.8 lines per active duty US military person. The code would be shorter if it was nothing but one line per person that prints how much to pay. You might argue that this would have maintenance issues, but automated porting of it would be trivial, and for the $billion they spent try to replace it, you could pay almost $1000 per print statement to keep it updated.
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Not to shocked (Score:2)
The DoD is well known for changing the specs of a project constantly through out the life time of a program so I'm not surprised the update in the 90s failed it probably had 5,000+ changes from it's initial concept and then you add in the required corruption and incompetence needed to be a government employee or contractor and it makes perfect sense it failed.
Re:Not to shocked (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct. And wrong. According to the Reuters article, there were more than 15,000 requirements changes during the lifetime of the project. So you had precisely the right idea. You just underestimated the ability of a bureaucracy to fight back. By an order of magnitude.
And that's what it was, too. Make no mistake, the project failed because a successful software system would reduce the headcount of the DFAS dramatically. That couldn't be allowed to happen, so it was sabotaged by eternal feature creep.
And of course, they started with PeopleSoft, and there's no organization better at absorbing all available money for no return besides the DOD itself. Talk about a match made in hell...
Is this overly centralized? (Score:2)
I wonder if part of the problem is that this is overly centralized. Someone above mentioned how they did this all with paper in WWII. I can't imagine the pay for millions of service personnel being calculated by an army of clerks based in Indianapolis. The actual calculations must have been more distributed, with perhaps pay records following a soldier along with his other records.
Decentralizing it should make the bureaucracy more flexible too. Especially in hardship cases like the one described in the stor
lowest bidders don't document (Score:2)
when you give work to the lowest bidder, you're bound to pay for inept programmers instead of computer scientists
use paycor\adp (Score:2)
Regardless of your political leanings this is a job that the private sector could handle way way better. It is super hard to create a good software shop...let alone being the military.
We use paycor and we have good to great IT in general. We could program a pay app, but why the hell would we? Is pay schedule really that complicated....if it is why not simplify it...a great opportunity for reform.
How much? (Score:2)
Seriously, a Billion Dollars?
Incompetence. This sounds like explaining to the boss how you can't write a program to pay 3.25 million employees accurately and on time.
Then explaining how you can't write a program that pays 325,000 employees accurately and on time.
Then explaining how you can't write a program that pays 32,500 employees accurately and on time.
But they did in the 60s.
Just as the FAA has sunk $ into new air traffic controls software with nothing to show for it, and New York City ditto with payr
call it what it is: fraud (Score:3)
when the mil/gov spend a billion on some software project and it fails, we need to start calling it what it is: fraud perpetrated by consultant/contractors.
it's bad enough when the industry burns 10-50M on an ERP project for a company (or university!), but pretty soon those tens of millions add up to real money. spending a billion should be HARD!
Typical Government Efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
They might have lost the source (Score:3)
Re-write it in awk (Score:3)
Of course what really needs to be done is to document the actual process and system requirements, and then just put up a modern payroll processing system. The biggest problem is that there are a lot of people whose job it is to take a piece of paper from one bin and put it in another. All of those jobs would be put at risk were you to actually do something substantive about this problem. They're far more concerned with their jobs than actually getting anything done.
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No, the problem is you don't understand the problem domain and thus just repeat platitudes on the assumption that doing so makes you look wise. This system has been in place for years, all the old
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Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by mere incompetence.
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that's $6,500 per soldier, per year, in pure bureaucracy.
When you contrast that number to the old $900 toilet seats and $450 hammers, $6,500 for corrupt bureaucracies to maintain their computer systems almost sounds like a bargain.
Re: (Score:3)
contract out that stuff to someone who is good at it... like ADP.
They did! That billion dollars wasn't to rewrite it -- that was just to buy and integrate a PeopleSoft package! Supposedly, PeopleSoft is good at that kind of thing, since that's what they sell to other big companies too stupid to write and maintain a simple payroll system.
They don't need to try integrating to someone else's package again, unless they want to shovel another billion dollars into some other undeserving contractor's hands.
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully the soldiers will be on our side in the forthcoming revolution.
Funny you should mention that. Pay in arrears is much of what fomented the Newburgh Conspiracy [wikipedia.org], and this time we don't have a George Washington to defuse the situation.