Sorry, I am sort of new. I learned a lot from you pros, but the term remediation, repair,testing keep cropping up. What are the differences? Does remediation includes testing? I know there are supposed to be three steps: assesment, then repair and finally testing. When a company say they are compliant, do they usually mean they have tested the lines.

-- Jenny (ignorant@ale.com), March 28, 1999

Answers

Hi Jenny and welcome to March Madness in Yourdanville.

I think I'll leave your question to the big guns here from whom I'm sure you'll receive a far more articulate answer than I can provide.

What really caught my attention was your email address: ignorant.

That set me thinking back to one of my favorite quotes which in light of some of this past month's posts I hope everyone will reflect upon:

"We are all ignorant, just about different things." -- Mark Twain

Again, welcome aboard and hang in there.

Quad

-- Quad (me@ignorant too.edu), March 28, 1999.

Hi Jenny. Remediation and repair are the same thing, although I guess you could consider remediation more in terms of fixing COBOL type programs, and repair more in the area of fixing embedded systems. Testing is done after the changes are made, to make sure the changes do what was intended. Working on large, complex programs, that have been modified by who knows how many other programmers over the decades, often isn't an easy task. Testing often shows that the first round of changes was incomplete, and/or introduces other unexpected problems (bugs). Then, you back up, make more changes and test again, until you get it right. Good testing involves much more than just changing a program, turning the clock forward, and running the program. You should include some year 2000 data in ALL existing files, and you should use some "bad data" to force exception processing to see how the program reacts. This is all very time consuming, and time is the enemy here. Many companies may be rushing the testing phase in an effort to get as much work done as possible. Need I say more? <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), March 28, 1999.