What is the solution? How can these huge systems be developed economically and correctly? These government agencies don't have the technical experience to hire and manage their own software developers and, from what people say, the big consulting firms don't either and/or they don't care. But a smaller firm that might be able to deliver a working solution would be seen as "too risky" to be awarded a big government contract when compared to a large, well-known consulting firm.
Why does the government not have more than a handful of people at 18F? Do they think computers are a fad that will go away? Government should be staffed to accomplish its mission, and the mission requires software. 18F should have tens of thousands of permanent employees.
Often the fix is not to build a huge project. For some of these failures they're trying to migrate from a paper system to something as automated as possible in a single step.
Incremental improvements are almost always possible. People have set up websites to submit paperwork where the forms just send an email or trigger a print job when submitted. It's an improvement over mail and faxes.
The solution is that we stop pretending that large projects are a good idea, that technology for the connected world is set-and-forget and having a ton of layers of people is a good idea. Because none of those things help.
Model the system as objects without writing code. Get the methods and properties accepted without writing code. Write a suite of tests for the model. Implement code.
That’s how complex systems don’t have to feel like monoliths.
