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Some of Possible Solutions to the 2000 Problem (4)

© Faisal Bin Bashir

Communicate with Business Partners

What are your suppliers and customers doing? If your systems are interdependent, then you need to agree on a format and a course of action. Using independent standards is the obvious intelligent choice, but whatever format that is agreed upon it must be implemented by all parties that will have systems affected by your own in-house changes.

Develop a Strategy for Deployment and Testing

Once you have committed to a plan of action, there needs to be a schedule for deployment and testing of the new system. There is no way that the deadline can be extended - regardless of your resources, you must be running when the Jan 1 2000 clock rolls over, or there will be losses to account for.

The year 2000 problem is the kind of programming project which is typically subject to delays and setbacks - characterized by serious time constraints, broadly defined scope and inter-compatibility problems. Many sources recommend that a separate project manager with experience in these kinds of applications be hired to assist in the timely completion of your plans. This project manager should preferably have experience in dealing with year 2000 conversions, but as many companies are finding out, such experienced personnel are few and far between.

Testing of the software has it's own unique problems and difficulties. Not only must you make sure that the software works with post-millennium code, but it must work with prior code and data alongside. This process is very time-consuming and where parallel testing equipment is not available (most cases), a large component of the testing will have to be carried out by hand, a time-consuming and error-prone process.

"Systems must be well tested to ensure that functionality has not been changed in any program as a result of the date changes. This means a unit test of the program, a system test with a test bed of data covering all functions, a simulation test to any date in the future that may impact your system (this involves moving your data and your system date into the future), and finally, a test with historical data to make sure you can process old data through the system once changes are complete. Developing a test bed for these changes is a significant task. The testing stage represents 40% of the effort for the entire project."

-- Brenda McKelvey from a report on the "Year 2000: Blueprint for Success" conference in Orlando, Florida, November 1995

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