Romney Defeat Due in Part to Poor Software Quality
Mitt Romney's Election Day defeat is being attributed to a number of important factors including the failure of Project Orca, a key software application that was intended to help turn out the vote, monitor election results, and report on suspected election fraud.
GOP insiders reported problems including poor communication and, more importantly, poor software quality and testing. In fact, post-election analysis has indicated that Project Orca lacked sufficient application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices to yield an effective and essential tool.
Project Orca was expected to be the killer app that would help turn out the vote and provide Romney operations operatives with real time information from the field, accessing Orca from their smartphones and feeding all data back to the main Romney campaign site inside the Boston Garden.
Failing to meet the necessary requirements for monitoring and reporting election results, Orca thus failed to assist with the all important Election Day get out the vote operations. Instead, the application, unable to handle the required volume, crashed repeatedly during the day.
The application actually was never tested in a realistic scenario under conditions similar to how it was to be used. Users complained about the lack of training and overall usability. The app performed so badly that some insiders believed that security had been breached and the system sabotaged.
Mitt Romney lost the election due to a variety of factors but one of the biggest issues was a less than adequate ground game on Election Day. Future presidential candidates will need to have ALM experts on the team for the effective development of tools needed to support election operations.
Orca was supposed to be the killer whale that would propel Mitt Romney into the White House. Instead of wanting a killer whale, Romney could have used an ALM expert, testers, and good DevOps engineers experienced with mobile and web apps.
