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December 19, 1999

In Final Year 2000 Testing, Focus Is on Smallest Flaws

The programs, sent by one of the nation's largest commercial real estate companies for testing by Data Integrity Inc., had been certified as Year 2000-ready by the large software company that created them. But Data Integrity and other companies that review code to verify software claims typically find scores, even hundreds of serious oversights.

"Our best clients still have 40 to 50 errors per millions of lines of code," said Richard E. Evans, an analyst with Meta Group of Stamford, Conn., a consulting firm that provides information on verification tools and services. "Half of those could corrupt data or crash systems."

That adds up to thousands of potentially serious flaws for banks, insurance companies and others.

The government and most of corporate America have declared that virtually all of their critical systems will function normally when Jan. 1 arrives.

But because only a portion of most computer code is actually tested to make sure the year "00" will be correctly interpreted, even the most confident computer managers anticipate at least minor flaws.

Thus, as the repairs and testing wind up, Year 2000 boils down to one pressing question: Since stamping out every Year 2000 date problem is impossible, has the caseload of miscalculations and crashes been reduced to manageable levels?

For the real estate company, the mirage of clean code disappeared when Mr. Parwani adjusted his scanning tactics for the obscure code in which the program was written. A three-day review of close to 2.5 million lines of the software vendor's supposedly Year 2000-ready code identified about 250 flaws.

"We found at least 10 flaws that would have required several days to fix," said a programmer for the real estate company, which allowed a reporter to observe the procedure on the condition that it not be identified. "They would not have stopped business but they might have interfered with things like tracking how long rents are overdue."

While true showstoppers rarely turn up in such inspections, the number of flaws uncovered naturally raises questions about whether the government and many corporations are overstating their readiness.

The prevailing confidence is probably justified as far as the New Year's weekend goes, but the longer-term picture is murkier, according to verification-tool providers like Data Integrity. As with software flaws in general, system crashes are usually less troublesome than malfunctions that generate faults not immediately apparent.

"Less than 10 percent of the problems we find would cause something to stop," said Scott Hilson, director of technical support for Reasoning Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based rival of Data Integrity. "This is more like termites than an earthquake."

The Year 2000 termites might be more dangerous than normal bugs because they are expected to peak in the first weeks of January, when many computer workers are already stretched thin handling malfunctions that occur as the old year ends and the new one begins.

"Anywhere from 2 percent to 5 percent of computer jobs normally fail in late December and early January," Mr. Evans of Meta Group said. That rate will more than double this year, according to projections by the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm in Stamford, Conn.

Unfortunately, thanks to the Year 2000 challenge, even the normal problems are likely to be more common in coming weeks. In addition to the Year 2000 flaws, programmers will be wrestling with other errors inadvertently added to the code during repair efforts. Based on an examination of 30 years of software records, Capers Jones, chairman of Software Productivity Research Inc. in Burlington, Mass., predicts that Year 2000 workers have introduced 7 flaws for every 100 they fixed.