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

To: Ken Salaets who wrote (4482)	3/10/1999 5:36:00 PM
From: Cheeky Kid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

You kept on bugging and bugging me for my view on Y2K, and I gave it too you. Why am I wasting time replying to you? When I discuss the issue with you guys, you twist my posts. SeeYA!!!!

To: Ken Salaets who wrote (4482)	3/11/1999 7:39:00 AM
From: flatsville	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9818

Big Ooooops!!! (But then again some of us knew this didn't we?) March 10, 1999 Y2K Validation: Vital and Misunderstood After spending a great deal of time, energy and money, many companies are nearing the end of their Year 2000 remediation process. But testing, the final and most important stage of Year 2000 compliance may be getting short shrift. According to the Gartner Group, testing should represent at least half of the total effort and expense of a Year 2000 compliance program. But research suggests that many companies and government agencies will not be able to adequately validate their remediated systems before Jan. 1, 2000. As recently as the spring of 1998, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University estimated that 67 percent of organizations had no formal Year 2000 testing program in place. And a recent report in the New York Times found that most states were behind in their Y2K efforts and thus will have little or no time for testing. "A lot of organizations try to boil Year 2000 testing down to one simple process," said H. Husmann, an independent consultant who specializes in data processing and re-engineering. "But it's much more complicated than that." Once their date-sensitive code has been fixed, many businesses send it to an independent vendor to have it double-checked for problems. This process is known as Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V). "The IV&V vendor is looking for two things: non-compliant code that was missed the first time around, and code that was fixed incorrectly," said Leland Freeman, vice-president of the Source Recovery Company. IV&V often does catch coding errors, said Freeman. However, "this process can produce a false sense of security." Systems face other Year 2000 risks (such as interfaces and operating environments) that IV&V can't detect. "Until a system is actually placed back into production," stressed Freeman, "you can't be sure all the problems have been fixed." To verify the success of Year 2000 remediation, companies must thoroughly test all of their internal systems, including third-party software, embedded systems, PCs, custom-written software and mainframe operating systems and hardware. It is equally important to test new software packages -- even those that claim to be Y2K-compliant. "A very good software manufacturer may be able to test 80 percent of an application's system functionality," explained Husmann. "There's just no substitute for testing an application in the environment where it will be used." A company's most mission-critical systems should also undergo regression testing. Every time a new system is validated, all the others need to be tested as well to make sure no errors have been introduced. An effective Year 2000 testing program must do more than just examine systems in isolation; it must also analyze the components of each program (unit testing), make sure that the units in a system work together (system testing) and verify that all systems interact correctly (integration testing). An organization must also make sure that its systems will work correctly with those of its business partners, regulators and customers -- a process known as external testing. All remediated programs must be tested for functionality in the present as well as on key dates in the Year 2000. To complicate matters further, said Husmann, there is no single industry standard for what constitutes an adequate Year 2000 testing program. And as costs increase, many organizations are working under tight deadlines. Only half are doing real-time testing before the Year 2000, said Geoff Unwin, vice-chairman of the executive board of the Cap Gemini Group. The key is to get started as soon as possible -- and to prioritize. "Year 2000 testing is like trying to fight twelve fires with a single bucket of water," said Husmann. "You can't put out all of them. So you use what you have as effectively as possible -- and then deal with the damage as best you can." (posted to csy2k this morning. No url.)