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The standard form letter says: "We expect to have our code corrected by December 31, 1998, which leads a full year for testing." It sounds great. It means little.
The fact is, there is no agreed-upon standard for testing. Information technology (IT) departments are not used to testing full systems. When they do, systems often crash.
The IT departments are not talking about this publicly. The PR people haven't heard this. Management neither knows nor cares; it's not the first quarter of 1999 yet.
This is from Westergaard's site (May 27). The author is Victor Porlier.
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Luis Garcia of Bay Networks gave one of the best presentations. "Large telecom operations with thousands of hubs and routers cannot be tested simultaneously as they operate in the real world. You can't create a test site for it." He noted that: "IT departments aren't used to deep testing, they have minimal documentation, and with multiple sites they have multiple points of possible failure." Other presenters made it clear that the word "test" on a Y2K project plan does not mean that a test plan has actually yet been scripted. Individual system tests, systems integration tests, and EDI tests are all waiting to be developed sometime in the coming months. While the mantra to "Remediate in '98 and Test in '99" continues, I hope the test scripts will be ready in seven months.
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