Year 2000

Year 2000 will cost in the region of $600 billion worldwide to correct.

Gartner Group, 1996

Year 2000 is a well-defined maintenance project—the specification is about as simple as you can get. It is the first project in IT history with an immovable deadline. The consequence of slippage is not just a missed deadline, but the total and catastrophic failure of the organization. The alternative to addressing the problem is to go out of business.

Visual Basic developers are in denial: 90 percent of all applications are affected, not just mainframe code. One bank we know of has developed many Visual Basic systems through the use of freelance contractors. Its own IT department has no support for the language. Today 8 million lines of Visual Basic code are under maintenance by managers. About 5 percent of this code will have to change, and 100 percent will have to be thoroughly tested (incidentally, testing is about 60 percent of the effort). It's really scary.

For a thorough discussion of this topic, refer to Chapter 9. Please refer to Appendix B for details of TMS's Year 2000 Visual Basic services and products, for example Visual DateScope 2000 and VBA2000.