This will come as no big surprise to those of you who have been following the issues for a while. Posted mainly for those new to Y2K awareness. Just exactly what impact this part of the problem will have remains to be seen, but I share Rubin's concern that the larger issue could be not that a system crashes but that "most everything appears to work, but [below the surface] it doesn't"

From Computerworld (click on link full, original article):

http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/CWFlash/99022292AA

Heads up: 'Fixed' Y2K code has flaws

Review shows one error in every 2,000 lines

02/22/99 Organizations spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make their systems year 2000-ready are likely to end up with a software portfolio that still has some flaws.

...

"It's a big problem. It's not easy to find every date field, especially in older legacy applications," said Carl Greiner, an analyst at MetaGroup, who is a supporter of independent verification.

...

Rubin advised companies to monitor those "nagging errors" that don't disable systems but can have ripple effects later, such as fouling up general ledger systems.

"My greatest fear is that most everything appears to work, but [below the surface] it doesn't," he said.

-- Arnie Rimmer (arnie_rimmer@usa.net), February 23, 1999

Answers

Here's anecdotal evidence: Sweetie was doing some non-Y2K work on a program and noticed a Y2K problem. It was checked off as OK on the Y2K checklist. What was the program? Well, let's just say that a lot of parolees would have disappeared from records if Sweetie hadn't stopped to fix it. We wondered how many such "OK" programs there were and, having worked for local, state and federal government between us, decided there were probably quite a few. Although Sweetie didn't invoke "It's not in my job description" many others would have. That's when our "They'll fix it" became "Er, maybe not."

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), February 23, 1999.

Ed Yourdon certainly called it.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), February 23, 1999.

Thenquestion still remains, "How many systems were remediated, but certain programs were NOT touched because they didn't have date issues but DID happen to utilize the newly defined record?" If these programs used the record, and were re-compiled, using the new data definitions, and the author used embedded re-defines NOT in the data dictionary, they're coming down, or creating gibberish and corupting databases.

Chuck

-- Chuck, night driver (rienzoo@en.com), February 23, 1999.