If you are living in Quebec you are probably aware about the debate surrounding the privatization of health-care, a debate that has been going on for quite a while. The debate about health-care in general has been going on for more than a decade, I wish I had a dollar for each political platform targeting this issue which pops up around election time.

There are generally 2 sides to the privatization of health-care debate: the side pushing for the privatization of health care services, typically pro-business, and the side wanting the government to run health care services, typically leaning towards a social democracy-type model.
The pro-business camp’s opinion is that privatizing health care services would make them more efficient and would also transfer the burden to the ones willing and able to pay for them.
The pro-social-democracy camp argues that this would cause an exodus of health-care professionals from the public services, which are barely coping with the current demand and which pay less, to the private services which would pay more and where health-care professionals would work under a smaller work load due to the filtering of “customers” by price. They argue that this would result in further degradation of the public health-care services, due to an even smaller number of professionals working for it, which in turn would raise the incentives for leaving it. The public health-care services would enter a down-ward spiral whose end-result would be that the people using the public services, the neediest in this case, would have no access to health-care services anymore. I subscribe to the first part (the public services would degrade over time), but not the second (the down-ward spiral) because there are ways to stop this exodus.
For the health-care as a public service camp the smallest chink in the public access armor would essentially rip it open to the onslaught of private health-care.

The fact is that what both camps are focusing on is the way health-care services are distributed to people and not on the imbalances between the supply and demand of such services. Anyone with a pair of eyes would see that the demand of these services greatly exceeds the supply: long waiting times in emergency rooms, people parked in the hospital corridors for days, etc… And here things start to get interesting…
Let’s suppose that you decide to privatize health-care completely and let the market decide who is paying for health-care that it consumes. A good or a service that has the supply and demand imbalances that health-care has would see its price get big pretty fast. Big prices mean also big profits, and there is no surprise here that the pro-business lobby is pushing towards privatization because they stand to gain quite a lot from it.
Now let’s suppose that you decide to keep the status-quo and allow health-care to be delivered only thru government agencies. The result would be that everyone would get the same pathetic service or no service at all, and this is exactly what we are getting right now: everybody gets to wait 5 hours in an emergency room regardless of how wealthy he or she is.

Both the pro-business group and the social-democrats are arguing over the means to distribute this very small supply of health-care services to a population that has a high demand for it. Leaving health-care to the market would ensure that only the wealthy would be have full access to it, leaving it the way it is would ensure that we are all getting the same service. It is essentially an argument over the way to distribute this scarce resource and over the winners and losers that come out of each particular distribution mechanism. Each camp is trying to prove that its distribution mechanism will also allow for the supply to grow faster, but I am pretty skeptical about it (*). So I would argue that we should look at the root of the problem and try to stimulate the supply of health care professionals and to enlarge the med schools quotas to reflect the current demand for such services.

Except that we have a bit of a problem (**) if we simply try to : we are leaving next to the US which is more than happy to let the whole health-care field to market forces. As explained above the result is that in US (which experiences pretty much the same imbalances between supply and demand) the price for health-care is very, very high along with profits and salaries among other things. If we increase the supply in Quebec we run the risk of seeing health-care professionals leave for the US in search of better salaries and reduced work-loads (***), an exodus similar to the possible exodus from public health-care agencies to private health-care companies.

So we have a problem. This pretty much is known. What solutions to this problem? Frankly, I don’t know. I think that we need to increase the number of health-care professionals running the risk of seeing some of them leave for US. In US things could be changing if the democrats get the White House (some health-care would be administered thru government agencies driving down prices and salaries) and this could dampen the incentives for leaving to US.
Hopefully we will manage to get out of the grid-lock that we find ourselves in…

* The pro-market argument for growing the supply to align itself with the demand is the following: a good which experiences high demand but a low supply sees its prices rise along with the profits. Entrepreneurs will realize that it is profitable to join this market because of the high profits and will start selling more of this very profitable good. This would in turn will raise the supply to match the demand for it and inevitably bring down the prices.
I don’t buy this argument because in health-care the supply is pretty inelastic to demand since it takes a very long time to “produce” a doctor, about 15-20 years. In order to have the supply align itself with the demand you would have to carry out extensive demographic studies from which to determine the future demand for health-care services and tweak the med schools admission rates for the future demand. The fact that supply is inelastic to demand in health-care make say that the only thing that a market-based health-care system will achieve in Quebec is to redistribute resources and not to redistribute resources plus create new ones.
There are probably some services within the health-care industry in which the supply is more elastic to demand and it would be a good idea to leave them to the market.

** It is a problem or an opportunity depending on how you look at it: high prices in US could drive the government of Quebec to sell some health-care services to US and use the money which these services would generate for funding other health-care services.

*** The fact that we have the US in vicinity renders a lot of the comparisons between Quebec and France moot: a French doctor doesn’t have the option of packing up his or her belongings in a minivan and drive 300 kms to his or her new workplace in US. This puts a downward pressure on health professionals salaries in France thus reducing the health-care costs.

P.S. I am seriously thinking about starting to write this journal in French, but I don’t have much experience in writing in French and I think the first posts would be absolutely ludicrous (I will be probably missing all the accents ;-)). I’ll see what I’ll do.

P.S.S. I like economics and I wrote this post mainly for applying my knowledge of economics to what I know about health-care in Quebec. I have not researched deeply how health-care is being regulated and implemented in Quebec, I just wanted to try out some concepts. Hope I got them right…

I was watching this infoQ presentation by Alexandru Popescu and Cedric Beust on testing when I realized that a big market for testing is seriously neglected.

Regarding my use of testing I would say that JUnit pretty much fills my bill and I don’t see a need to move to TestNG. I was watching the presentation not so much as to know more about TestNG, but to get some exposure to the market for testing products (*). So the features which were presented and which were said to be in a high demand from the users were the ability to define test groups, to test data connectivity and to define dependencies between tests (**). Pretty fair, I would take this functionality to be a logical progression from the ability to run a bunch of tests at random as JUnit lets you do it, you are basically starting to look at the tests you run from a higher level and you start looking for ways to aggregate these tests into higher-level constructs, such as test groups, which can then be manipulated according to various needs.
So far I would say that Test NG is looking at ways to manage the complexity coming out of a high number of tests. Test NG is for test-heavy shops, where testing is considered a concern on par or close to development. Not a bad thing and I pretty sure that TestNG covers some functionality which is in high demand by Java developers.

There is, however, one need for testing that so far it is largely unsatisfied and sorely missed: the need to test workflows or series of events. Let’s say that you have an application that is a series of MDBs, each accepting messages, transforming them and then outputting them to the next MDBs. You would want to be able to test this application end-to-end.
Let’s say that you have an application that receives market trades, needs to process them and then transform them in order to send them downstream to tax systems, settlement systems, etc… You would want to put thru a trade, set-up in a certain way and then trace its execution thru these flows and determine if, in what stage and in what shape has this trade reached the Application-to-Tax-System gateway.
When I think about work-flow testing I usually think about defining a message, inputting this message into a work-flow engine and then defining interceptors to see how the original message has been manipulated at various stages. You may need to test both the work-flow itself (to see if the message has been going thru the work-flow that it needed to go thru), the end-result (to see where the message has been forwarded to and in what shape) as well as how it behaves at various stages in this workflow (if needed). I see work-flow testing primarily concerned with interception of messages (and this would probably be a great use of AOP) and with the possibility to correlate messages passing thru this work-flow with the original message.

OS testing tools so far are limited to synchronous testing. I wonder at what point will the need for work-flow testing become so pressing and the demand for it so great so that one OS shop will start doing something about implementing a testing framework for testing workflows. Then we could use Event-Driven-Testing for testing an application written in a Event-Driven-Architecture manner…

* I know that trying to form an opinion on a market such as the market for OS testing tools from a vendor presentation is a pretty risky business, what you get from vendor presentations is usually distorted because of bias and time constraints but I will assume that this presentation gave a fair image of what users want from testing tools.

** From what I know TestNG is a lot more than some annotations that give you the possibility to form test-groups and test dependencies. However, I would say that these issues are probably considered more important and more aligned with the market for OS testing tools since they were the ones which were included in this presentation.

P.S. If I were to choose one enterprise concern which is not addressed by the Spring stack I would choose work-flow. Spring has modules for integration, batch, transaction management, security management, connectivity to various end-points, etc…, it is missing this capability. From what I see work-flows are used pretty heavily in the enterprise space and for now I think they are mostly implemented either by in-house solutions or by commercial solutions. OS could probably make a contribution in this space as well. And if it does it should probably try to give the developer the ability to test work-flows, or at least make it easy for him/her.

P.P.S. The comments by Alan Keefer on this thread reinforce my beliefs that we need to carry out tests at every level, from high-level to unit test. For a work-flow based system this would mean that we need to test the work-flows themselves and not only the units making them up.

Later edit:  There are actually a few OS workflow tools. OSWorkflow, the ones at the bottom of this article and probably a few others. I should try them at one point.

I was reading Bill Burke`s post on transaction compensation via REST and JBPM and I have to tell that I agree with most of his remarks. Bill makes a very interesting point about compensating a transaction: that the compensation itself is an activity of a business process (the activity of handling failure, very likely outside of the system involved) and that this activity could be implemented as a regular activity in a business process using jBPM. It could also be exposed to the outside world thru a REST service.

This is a very interesting take on compensations and his proposition (that compensations are regular business activities that are part of a business process and that could be coded as such) gives a lot of flexibility to handling compensations. However, is exactly this flexibility that will probably force someone away from the compensation scheme devised by Bill and back to WS-BA. As Mark pointed out you still need to enforce end-points to run the same version of the communication protocol, be it WS-BA or an ad-hoc REST-based protocol.
However, I would go further and say that the flexibility devised by Bill runs counter to market acceptance. Standards are straight jackets which people choose to wear when it makes sense, typically when it makes some process (such as interacting with a different system) more efficient. Coding a business activity in WS-BA would enable you to plug it effortlessly different systems implementing the WS-BA standard, in theory at least. You would expose your application to the outside world effortlessly and you could interact with a greater number of systems because you have chosen to trim down your application to fit into the WS-BA straight-jacket.

On the other side, if your application cannot be forced into the WS-BA standard probably it would make sense to drop this standard and expose the compensation logic as you and your partners agree. It would not be the first time that a standard gets ditched for a proprietary solution particular to a few partners and certainly not the last time. Sometimes a straight jacket is just too stifling…

Initial am inceput sa scriu acest post dupa ce Vasile Petcu, baiatul din spatele lui zoso.ro care se crede fenomen mediatic, mi-a sters un comentariu pe care l-am facut acestei tampenii de articol. M-a enervat un pic acest lucru dar l-am trecut cu vederea, nu e prima oara cand tipul asta imi sterge comentariile pentru ca ii strica firma (de fapt n-am ajuns niciodata sa-mi vad un comentariu care sa reziste pe situl lui mai mult de cateva ore, e chiar hilara chestia asta). Ce m-a scos din pepeni este faptul ca am vazut cum a sters comentariul altui tip care semna Mihnea. Sa vezi pe viu cum dispare un comentariu de bun simt la 15 minute dupa ce a fost introdus e o experienta destul de nasoala…

Asa ca enervat fiind m-am pus sa scriu acest post si, dupa cum probabil ca deduceti din titlu, urma sa dau o definitie la cuvantul jeg in care sa-l introduc si pe Vasile si pe blogul lui de cacat. Intre timp m-au prins niste treburi, apoi n-am mai avut timp, etc…, s-au intamplat anumite chestii care mi-au pus in evidenta cat de 2 lei este sa te enervezi pentru niste chestii atat de efemere.
La fel de 2 lei ca si tot internetul romanesc care poate fi descris de un singur sit: wall-street.ro. Este o idee buna sa va duceti pe wall-street.com, wall-street.co.uk, wall-street.de, wall-street.be, wall-street.it ca sa vedeti in ce companie se afla wall-street.ro. wall-street.ro este fata de Wall Street Journal ceea ce un Logan tunat este fata de un Lamborghini si ceea ce internetul romanesc este fata de ceea ce vezi pe afara.

Pentru incheiere: Ba Vasile, vezi ca in curand se schimba macazul in Romania si toata clasa asta de mijloc o sa cam dispara din zona. Tu continua sa postezi articole gen `xyz.ro sunt niste spammeri de cacat, stati sa va arat cum ii fac dintr-un reverse-dns query` sau sa te defulezi contra unor tipi cu care n-o ai curajul niciodata sa te iei in gura, sunt curios unde o sa ajungi. Si tu, si toti baietii aia care acum 3 ani instalau retele Windows pentru un bax de bere la 2 litri si acum se cred genii in comunicare.

P.S. Pentru cine se intreaba daca voi mai merge pe zoso.ro le voi spune ca probabil da, din cand in cand. De fiecare data cand vad cata mizeria iese din tipul asta ma felicit ca am plecat din Romania si n-am de a face cu oameni ca el. Asta ma face sa ma simt bine.

Today the weather in Montreal has been particularly brutal, we got 15 centimeters of snow at the temperature of -11 Celsius. Actually, it was not snow, it was some sort of ice pellets, around 1 millimeter in size that gathered on the roads. Anyone in Montreal would not describe this as brutal, but rather as normal. What made the normal brutal were the winds of 70 km/h that were throwing these ice pellets into your face like one horrible vacuum cleaner running in reverse.

I was making my way along the streets of downtown Montreal cursing the weather like everyone around me when I see this guy waiting at a red light. He’s dressed in a suit and a tie, in sharp contrast to the sea of parkas around, with his face and knuckles bluish red from the cold. The shoes, not winter boots,  are ankle-deep in the chipped ice that is decorating our streets right now. He is fixating the red light waiting for a chance to keep going, who knows where, while fighting the wind that is trying to unbutton his suit. I kept wondering how did this guy got parachuted into this environment and where the hell he left his winter-coat. I also wondered at how this guy was determined to keep going, oblivious to the horrific conditions around him.

A fine picture of determination…