Y2K: Human touch still needed

By Adam Gifford

"Fish in a white wine sauce" might not sound like a date, but the phrase triggered a date routine in some code scanned for year 2000 compliance by Compaq's Application Development Centre in Christchurch.

Y2K sales specialist John Murphy, who set up the centre's year 2000 team in early 1997, said that sort of programmer's whimsy was the reason the ADC, then part of Digital, developed a code checking methodology which uses a combination of automatic tools and human beings.

"How an automatic scanner would find something like that is beyond me," he said.

As a provider of custom software, the ADC has a responsibility to customers to ensure their systems keep on going. After all, the first advice of Y2K consultants is "ask the vendor."

It has four projects on the go now, and has completed another eight. ADC manager John Hoonhout said customers are mostly organisations with mainframe systems running a million lines of code and more.

"Typically if a customer has one million lines of code or more, that system is their business," he said.

The ADC's first task was to work out a way to give customers a reasonable estimate on how much it would cost to assess and repair code and how long it would take "in such a way we weren't doing charitable service."

The number of lines of code, while an interesting fact, doesn't determine the amount of work needed. That has more to do with the number of date variables in it.

"People want a fixed price, we wanted time and materials. So we came up with something where we look at each line with a potential date variable and assess it against a standard the customer has decided to use for Y2K compliance," Mr Hoonhout said.

The initial costing stage, where a client's source code is run through the ADC's system and the number of date variables is worked out, now takes only a few weeks and costs less than $10,000. A contract is then drawn up for the assessment and remediation phases, or the client is free to cast around for other quotes. None so far has gone elsewhere.

If somebody later wants to audit what a customer has done, they will be able to provide a mountain of documentation.

One of the first projects was fixing a core system for the Australian Stock Exchange, some 2.6 million lines of code.

"We took the approach it was worth investing in the processes to get everything right. We've got ISO 9000 accreditation, and we didn't want to jeopardise that."

After evaluating the automated tools available at that stage, Mr Murphy's team developed its own system which so far has proven effective, using the standard 80-20 rule - there may be tools which can find 80 per cent of the problem, but that last 20 per cent has to be checked by eye.

Mr Murphy said the cost of fixing problems ranges from an eighth to a quarter of the cost of finding them.

Most of the testing is left to the clients, because for many the costs of setting up a test environment outside the client organisation would be huge.

"We try to do it in most cost-effective way for us and the customer. We're interested in repeat business and want to make sure when we finish year 2000 work for existing customers or ones outside, they will want to come and talk to us about other development work."

A common problem is that clients do not have all the source code for their applications. They may send a tape with incomplete code, code which has not been compiled for years and is out of synchronisation with the database, or which contains large amounts of obsolete code.

Mr Murphy hopes the Y2K experience will be a salutary lesson to keep control of their software.

That will be extremely important in the months ahead, as organisations who have had their repairs done must keep a sharp eye on version control and date standards and hope no non-compliance creeps into the system before the century rolls over.