Y2K - Testing

Hot on the trail of last weeks article - Testing Times Ahead, this weeks offering looks at the nitty gritty of how to perform Y2K testing on your systems and applications.

Make sure the hardware works

First of all, before you do any software testing it is essential that you run your tests on a fully Y2K compliant machine. That is, you must ensure that the PC you use is fully Y2K compliant before you start testing your applications.

This is necessary, as applications will often make use of the system date and time within their functions. If the hardware is NOT compliant then it will feed the software invalid information which will make the software perform incorrectly. This being the case, the software maybe perfectly all right but you won't know that. So, use a fully Y2K compliant machine to test.

Use a stand alone machine

It is advisable that when testing, you use a standalone machine. That is, a machine that is NOT connected to a network. The reason for this is that you will need to change the machine's clock, which may cause the server to malfunction.

If you are testing software that normally runs off a server, then ideally, you need an isolated server with your machine connected. Ensure that no other machines connect to the server during testing. No "live" data should be used either - always take copies of data files so that if problems occur, you are not effecting real data.

The tests

Last week I mentioned 5 categories that would give you a firm test bed from which to operate. These categories are:

Data Storage

Data Retrieval

Date Calculations

File Date Stamps

System Date/Time Tests

Within each of these categories, you need 2 main areas of testing. System Tick Over and System Reboot.

System Tick Over

This test requires you to set the computers clock to 31/12/1999 with a time of 23:55. Once set, start the application to be tested and then carry out the tests. During this time, the clock will tick over to 1/1/2000. Once this has occurred, you can check to see that the application is still performing as it should.

Be careful here. If the system crashes then you should repeat the test. If it still fails, then you know the application is non-compliant. That is simple. What is more difficult is if the program appears to work but is in fact processing data incorrectly. Carrying out tests on the above 5 categories should highlight these problems. Once you have carried out the tick over test for the application you can then shut the machine down and switch off. You are then ready to carry out the System reboot tests.

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