In my mind's eye, I see a conference taking place some time ago, where the top decision-makers of a company are being addressed by a consultant or the representative of an American software house which wants the company's Y2K remediation business.

"It's time for those involved with data processing to realize that cutting corners just does not work in the long run. It is cutting corners which has brought on the Y2K crisis in the first place. There are various remediation approaches, but only one guarantees that your organization will not have to do any remediation work in a future year. That approach is year-field expansion. These other approaches, windowing or encapsulation, they will just postpone the problem because at some point in the future, measures will have to be taken once again." (the speaker is very careful not to describe the nature of this future work)

"Now your organization still has time to do it right, to not cut corners, to permanently fix the date problem for once and for all." (the organization is probably in deep trouble wrt time and doesn't know it.)

So the organization decides that year-field expansion is the professional, risk averse way to go, whereupon they ship the remediation off to India or the Phillipines, where the painstaking software analysis required by year-field expansion is sure to be completely performed, you bet.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 05, 1999

Answers

Did ANY remediation project get shipped off to India or the Phillipines??

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), September 05, 1999.

Some implicit assumption here that work done in India/Phillipines = bad work? Got any hard evidence for that? Lots of programmers in India, so if the problem is checking zillions of lines of code why NOT do it somewhere with lots of people to do that line-by-line checking? More people in the loop -> more checking and more testing.

-- Good value overseas (a@b.cde), September 05, 1999.

To K. Stevens and Good Value Overseas:

In the computer press there have been articles about a great deal of remediation work going to India, the Phillipines, and other "low-cost" countries.

I actually haven't heard any horror stories, or any stories, about what PI firms have done. I have about India. Three items which have appeared on this forum recently:

1. One person mentioned that these Indian programmers were producing the worst "spaghetti code" that he'd ever seen in his life.

2. Another mentioned that their Indian contractor had increased record sizes 2 characters for each expanded year field even though there were unused characters in the record ("filler") which were intended to be used in a case such as this. So all of the job control language had to be reworked. Mega-stupid.

3. Finally, someone reported that the company she was working for had received a deliverable from an Indian company, and been assured that it had been tested. It didn't work. When asked whether it had been tested successfully, the reply was "you didn't ask us that."

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 05, 1999.