I don't envy the army of geeks who are engaged in trying to salvage something from the healthcare.gov debacle. They've been at it for six weeks with still no clear prospects of when the site might be usuable - even barely.

Jeff Zients, the Obama administration's point man riding herd on the army of techies who are frantically working to repair the glitches that are constantly showing up, says they've established some priorities; a top 50 list of the most important fixes for the website. Of course, that doesn't include more dozens of minor issues that need to be addressed.

Politico:

Jeff Zients, the Obama administration's point man in the repair mission, joined the daily update for reporters Friday and said there is a top priority punch list - with "50 priority fixes as we enter this week."

And that doesn't count the lower priority fixes in what Zients called an "iterative process."

In the conference call he said the system is getting better - but it's not where it needs to be.

"We clearly need the system to perform reliably with fast response times at higher volumes," he said.

The administration is aiming to get the site working smoothly for the "vast majority" of users by the end of this month - but they've also noted that "smoothly" doesn't mean perfect. Zients said he expects "intermittent periods of suboptimal performance."

Not quite sure what he means by an "iterative process." He may be referring to some elements of the of the website that have repeat failures for certain functions that would need to be addressed. It sounds as if fixing the minor stuff will be a long, laborious process - a matter of finding and fixing a lot of code.

T-minus 15 days and counting before the deadline offered by the administration for fixing the website - or, at least making it bearable to navigate. It sounds like they're still a long way away from achieving that goal.