In March of 1999 Australia(govt. and business in concert) had 2 billion lines of code(cobol) that had been sent abroad for remediation sent for IV&V(sampling was about 4 million lines). Code was found to have enough unfound date data formats to essentially render the code unusable(was in what was,provably, a guaranteed failure mode). The IV&V vendor also had a spectacularly fast and accurate remediation tool. Many, many millions of lines of tested code later the govt.-private sector consortium apprised the vendor that the code was perfect-passed every imaginable test. All date data formats found and corrected. Aussies then gave the boot to huge IT vendor who had brokered the messed up remediation and assured the new, thoroughly vetted vendor, that they would be doing all of the work from that point forward. Well, a few more "tests" ensued and the vendor said hey, no more freebies. Let's get on with it(it being the remediation of aforementioned 2 billion lines plus another 5-7 billion lines that had had nothing whatsoever done in the way of correction)Bottom line is that a decision was made just not to bother with the whole mess and let it go uncorrected or, at least, uncorrected by a method that would have cost them a negotiated 26c per line. Previous unsuccessful effort had cost them 4c per line. Don't claim to know what happened to those 7-8 billion lines of unremediated code but sure hope that they are functional now. Sleep well.

-- Barbie Shrimpton (crocodundee@badcode.com), December 07, 1999

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-- Stars and Stripes (stars_n_stripes@my_deja.com), December 07, 1999.