Applying Software Testing and Evaluation Techniques in Year 2000 Compliance Testing

Yinong Chen
Programme for Highly Dependable Systems
Department of Computer Science
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
yinong@cs.wits.ac.za


Abstract
Year 2000 bugs are just errors in the design of software and hardware 
which won't be activated before the year 2000. Considering dates and 
times as a part of inputs, this paper uses general software testing 
and evaluation techniques as guidelines for testing year 2000 compliance 
of software systems. The lesson to learn from year 2000 problems is that 
the "minimum cost" design methodology may not be a cost effective way of 
designing a system if we include the maintenance cost like the additional 
year 2000 compliance testing. The discussion is then extended to a broader 
range of problems caused by the increasing level of complexity and software 
reuse.

Keywords: software testing, Y2K, verification, evaluation