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I think Ed is soliciting input from his Humpty Dumpty Y2K book here, not trying to facilitate a "general" Y2K dicussion.

What you need to be doing here for Ed is providing material that he can add to one of the first three chapters which would make a particular argument "more or less" compelling, perhaps to find a creative way to tie in the "Humpty Dumpty" title with the first chapter of the book.

I was thinking "Humpty Dumpty Dumpster", but you might gross out your readers by describing some Y2K "starvation" scenario where masses are huddled at the dumpsters of grocery stores and restaurants looking for "rotten" food. "Humpty Dumpty Dumpster Diving".

Just a little alliteration to drive you nuts. Say it five times fast, Ed.

I personally would like to see some focus put on code quality, have you seen the "clean room" techniques that are starting to appear in college material? Perhaps you could e-mail me privately, with your opinion.

Will "clean room" "clean up" Y2K?

Glen Austin

-- Glen Austin (gdaustin@aol.com), August 12, 1999

Answers

Glen,

Cleanroom techniques have been around for nearly 20 years. Popularized by Harlan Mills and his colleagues at IBM Federal Systems Division (sold to Loral a few years ago) in the Bethesda, MD area. I think some of the IBM folks introduced the concept into software engineering courses being presented at Univ of Maryland.

Still some controversy about the general idea, but widely accepted as a potentially useful approach, especially safety-critical systems. However, it's in stark contrast to the "good-enough" approach that characterizes most software projects today.

It's also entirely irrelevent to the Y2K situation at this point, since the remediation efforts are virtually finished in most organizations. The volume of work to be done was so vast that I doubt that a cleanroom approach could have been realistically implemented in most cases anyway.

The most important activity for most organizations in the remaining 141 days is contingency planning. Even if all of their own code had been repaired with a cleanroom approach, it wouldn't eliminate the possibility of defects in their supply-chain.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (HumptyDumptyY2K@yourdon.com), August 12, 1999.


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