November 15th, 2012
It's always an inconvenience when a computer stops working, a website goes down, or any other numerous situations. The Republican party recently had a taste of this inconvenience and at the worst possible time.
The culprit is Project ORCA. This Technology was designed to assist election day volunteers to best direct their efforts. What resulted was a massive fail. Project ORCA wouldn't let people log in, and gave the users who could log in wrong data.
Some wonder what part the failure of this technology had on the election. At least one believes that if the volunteers hadn't been wasted, and they resorted to the old fashioned means of getting people to the polls, they could have made a greater difference in swing states.
As a tech person, I'm naturally interested in knowing what went wrong. Of course, it sounds like a software issue but at what point? Was the hardware not able to handle the volume? That can be problematic.
In the end, perhaps the greatest lessons a techie can learn from this experience is:
Although some say nay, there are ways to test the threshold of systems and networks. The theory is actually quite simple. It's unknown whether this was done with ORCA, and sometimes issues can creep in when QA efforts have been secured. Still, I can help but wonder how well they tested the process.
Finally, I think it is good to have a Plan B. Having worked in a for-profit business as a tech support, if you can't get a process working within a reasonable amount of time, you have to know when to go back to Plan B. While Plan B can be different things for different scenarios, it seems clear that the Republicans could have and therefore should have had a backup plan in place, and then, when the system had been malfunctioning for say, an hour, they need to post a message on the log-in screen with the Plan B notification. The only thing I can think of is that someone didn't know when to launch Plan B - or didn't have a Plan B in place.
This should serve as a reminder to everyone in the technology community how important it is to accurately test their product before game day. Although the testing process can be mundane and repetitive, without a thorough testing process, our products and services will fail. While we may not have an election on the line our client's satisfaction should be just as important; after all, who lives in the White House doesn't pay my bills - the client does.