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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues
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To: C.K. Houston who wrote (3493)2/1/1999 1:00:00 PM
From: B.K.Myers  Read Replies (1) of 9818
 
Cheryl

I saw that article in the Washington Post and I was surprised and disappointed. I worked on the Y2K remediation of the systems that are discussed in the article. When I left the project last year, we had completed the remediation and only a small amount of testing remained. We were concerned at that time about the interfaces with other systems, particularly how to test all of the external interfaces. They used date expansion for all date fields used internally.

I stayed in touch with one of the members of their Y2K remediation team and when the project was winding down last summer / fall, he felt that they had everything under control. We used to joke about how Y2K would cause all kinds of problems, but at least the House of Representatives would have their parking fees deducted from their paychecks (parking fees are a hot political item in D.C.).

One of the systems that the article specifically addresses is the Legislative Information Management System (LIMS). This system passes data to an external system that produces reports and on-line queries into the database. This external interface was discussed at length, but by the time that I left the project, no suitable means of testing had been decided upon.

As is the case with most systems that contain external interfaces, the cross-system testing is probably the most difficult to test. Although the computer interfaces work continuously between the systems, the people behind the systems usually don't know each other, or in some cases, they don't even know whom to contact to discuss the interfaces.

I have seen this cross-system interface testing problem on all Y2K projects that I have worked on. The systems with external interfaces that are most vulnerable to Y2K problems are those whose century cannot be clearly inferred from a two digit year. It seems obvious to me that we will go into 2000 without all interfaces being tested. It's a task that is simply too large to tackle at this late date.

B.K.
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