Many people seem certain about what happened to cause the healthcare.gov fiasco. Stories are starting to trickle out, and eventually they’ll be an ocean of them. To anyone familiar with software development, especially in large organizations, these stories include familiar elements of character and plot. From those, it’s easy to extrapolate and fill in the details based on imagination and experience. We all know what happened.

Well, we don’t. In a project of that size, no one knows what happened. No one can know what happened. Imagine Rashomon scaled up to hundreds of people, each making his own observations and decisions along the way.

As time goes by, I anticipate some people saying that the project will represent a turning point in software development and project management. “Surely,” they will say, “after a project failure of this size and scope, people will finally learn.” Alas, I’m less optimistic. As the first three premises of rapid software testing describe it, software development is a human activity that is surrounded by 1) confusion, 2) complexity, 3) volatility, 4) urgency and… 5) ambition. Increasing ambition causes increases in the other four items too. In our societies, we could help to defend ourselves against future fiascos by restraining our ambitions, but I fear that people will put blindfolds on each other, pass around the keys, and scramble to get back into the driver’s seat of the school bus. How will they do this?

One form of the blindfold is to say “That not going to be a problem here because…”

…failure is not an option.
…we have our best people on it.
…we can’t disappoint the client.
…it doesn’t have to be perfect. (thanks, Joe Miller, @lilshieste)
…we’ll fix it in production.
…no user would ever do that.
…the users will figure it out.
…the users will never notice that.
…THAT bug is in someone else’s code.
…we don’t have to fix that; that’s a new feature request.
…it’s working exactly as designed.
…if there’s no test case for it, it’s not a bug.
…the clients will come to their senses before the ship date.
…we have thousands of automated tests that we run on every build
…this time it will be different.
…we have budget to fix that before we deploy.
…at least the back end is working right.
…if there are performance problems, we’ll just add another few servers.
…we’ve done lots of projects just like this one.
…foreign-language support is something we could cut.
…that list there says that this is a level three threat, not a level one threat.
…the support people can handle whatever problems come up.
…this graph shows that the load will never get that high.
…now is too soon; we’ll tell the clients about the problems after we’ve fixed them.
…we’re thinking positively&mdashthat can-do spirit will see us through.
…we still have plenty of time left to fix that.
…the spec didn’t say anything about having to handle special characters. How are single quotes a big deal?
…the client should have thought of that before.
…seriously, that’s just a cosmetic problem.
…it’s important not to complicate things.
…everybody WILL put in some overtime and we WILL get this thing done.
…well, at least the front end looks good, and people will be happy with that.
…everyone here is committed to making sure this ships on time.
…we’ll just shorten the test cycle.
…if there’s a problem, the other/upstream/downstream team will let us know.
…they can take care of that in training.
…we’ve planned to make sure that nothing unexpected happens.
…we’ve got this fantastic new framework that’ll make things go faster.
…we’ll pull a bunch of people off other projects to work on this one.

I wonder whether these things were said, at one time or another, during the healthcare.gov project. I don’t know if they were. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t work on it. But I’ve heard these things on projects before, I know that I can listen for them, and I know that they’re a sign of trouble ahead. Are they being said on your project?