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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: R. Bond who wrote (2048)	6/26/1998 4:24:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

'On Fri, 26 Jun 1998 04:46:47, webmaster@lucidimages.com wrote:> Mayday, Mayday ... > The replacement, called the Advanced Automation System (AAS), combines all > the challenges of computing in the 1990s. A program that is more than a > million lines in size is destributed across hundreds of computers and > embedded into new and sophisticated hardware, A million lines is pretty big. The mega system that Shmuel and I worked on in the 1980's, the one that was late and over budget but still a huge success, was less than a million original lines. The final cost, including the two mainframe computer centers was over a billion dollars. >... And the FAA conservatively expected to pay about > $500 per line of computer code, five times the industry average for > well-managed development processes. Fully burdened with the production computer centers, testing and training, D2/D3, was over $1,000/line. > That project is also spiralling down the drain. Now running about five years > late and more than $1 billion over budget, the bug-infested program is being > scoured by software experts at Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute > of Technology to determine whether it can be salvaged or must be canceled > outright. The reviewers are scheduled to make their report in September. Bzzzzzt! Sorry, I don't think SEI and the academic types are experts. These are people who derive their expertise from reading about mega software engineering projects. Talking about how large code projects are done isn't the same as doing large code projects. Thinking grand thoughts about masses of software isn't the same as cranking out a mass of software. There are very few people who have actually broken a sweat on a mega software engineering project. Even dragging in someone like Professor Brooks would be suspect. He was at the top of the pyramid and very likely saw the project differently from a mid-manager or a code-grunt. I'm not saying that the mid-manager or the code-grunt has more to contribute than a Brooks. They have a different perspective and if you want to know what's really going on, you need all types. You might include one CMU/MIT SEI'er for laughs I'd love to get Shmuel, Secor, Infomagic, Oxler, and two or three other c.s.y2k'ers on a team to rip the FAA project and put it back on track. We could do it. ...and would it ever be fun, 14 hour days for a month, the screaming matches, ...and that's at the breakfast buffet. > Disaster will become an increasingly common and disruptive part of software > development unless programming takes on more of the characteristics of an > engineering discipline rooted firmly in science and mathematics. > Fortunately, that trend has already begun. Over the past decade industry > leaders have made significant progress toward understanding how to measure, > consistently and quantitatively, the chaos of their development processes, > the density of errors in their products and the stagnation of their > programmers' productivity. Researchers are already taking the next step: > finding practical, repeatable solutions to these problems. I have no idea what the above paragraph is about.> > [Continued in Part 4] > ------------------------------- ____ 'Subject: Re: Software's Chronic Crisis - Part 3 From: kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net (cory hamasaki)Date: 1998/06/26 Message-ID: <7kepWhCNP4qd-pn2-QNzMJUwgWCWG@localhost> Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000[More Headers] [Subscribe to comp.software.year-2000]

To: R. Bond who wrote (2048)	6/27/1998 3:14:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

'UN Resolution Calls for Global Cooperation on Y2K The United Nations will take up a resolution shortly calling on member states to raise the priority of the Year 2000 issue and forge global cooperation. Speaking at the World Congress on Information Technology in Fairfax, VA, Ambassador Ahmad Kamal, chairman of the UN Working Group on Informatics, said the resolution calls on the Economic and Social Council to prepare action guidelines for member states at its meeting next month, and establishes a UN monitoring and reporting system. Briefing a series of wide-ranging UN actions in his remarks, Kamal said, ".we are far, very far, from being sanguine about results." He noted that common action, not finger-pointing, is the solution. "Y2K is obviously a challenge, but it is also an opportunity," he said. "Great potential exists in several developing countries to assist in addressing the global dimensions of the problem.Many developing countries.have a large pool of software developers and engineers capable of analyzing and re-writing the non-compliant programs, and doing so at a fractional comparative cost." Kamal, Permanent Ambassador to the UN from Pakistan, spoke on a Year 2000 panel which also included ITAA President Harris Miller, International Chamber of Commerce Secretary General Maria Cattaui, and IBM Year 2000 Global Initiatives General Manager David Cassano. Panelists' remarks are available at conferencecast.worldcongress1998.org. Vice President Al Gore participated in the World Congress via interactive video and urged conference attendees to get the Y2K job done. Perhaps responding to recent criticism by House Speaker New Gingrich and other Republicans in Congress, Gore referred to the rhetoric surrounding the Year 2000 issue. He urged high tech business leaders to action, particularly where big businesses are in a position to help their suppliers.' ... 'Y2K comatose countries may panic when they learn about the peer pressure plans of the Joint Year 2000 Council to create country by country Y2K status pages on the web. The Council is co-sponsored by the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, the G-10 central bank governors' Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems and other groups.' ... 'In European Union member states, the Moody's executive said that the Euro conversion generally racks up several times the budget attributed to Y2K efforts. Y2K compliance, he said, is often viewed as a "necessary evil" in these countries. The Euro grabs mindshare, he indicated, for political as well as economic reasons.' ... 'And that's the good news. "In many emerging markets, both banks and many bank regulators are still utterly unprepared for Y2K-indeed, they are often even unaware of the real challenges of the process," Theodore said. Elsewhere, he indicated, language and cultural differences may prove to be significant challenges to Y2K compliance.' ... '3M estimates it will spend $70 million to make its Y2K correction. The good news, according to Tibesar, is that the repair process appears to cost less than industry averages. Nor has the St. Paul site been racked by rampant wage inflation for Y2K workers. Unknowns include the embedded systems area, where Cripe says she is depending on engineers who are still in the process of determining the extent of the company's exposure; and contingency planning, which Cripe admits has taken a back seat to the July conversion deadline.' ____ From the ITAA news letter