> Where, pray tell, does one get a freeware program to handle $10 billion
> worth of futures trading on SE Asia markets? Or would you have to go
> to shareware for that one? How about the program to coordinate
> international money transfers with exchange rate trends for 200 different
> currencies? I'll bet you'd have to go to shrink-wrap s/w there.
Shrink wrap??? Are you kidding? No way you can find this on the
store shelf! This is custom software developed for you by a consulting
firm or internal staff! As is most of the Y2K software! That is why the
project is so expensive.
> > Set up the new stuff in parallel ... test the hell out of it, make
> > the new UI asymptotically close to the old one
>
> How do you know what the old stuff does? It is tens of thousands of
> programs, scattered all over the company, with user and code documentation
> that is at best out of date, more likely completely missing. The UI is
> probably mostly 3270-based for that fraction of the programs that are
> interactive, and is printer output for the majority of it.
Correct. All custom developed software by consultants and internal
staff.
> > ... (Yes, I have actually done this, on a live network
> > with 60K users. It worked. No big deal.)
>
> I suspect that what you did involved replacing the network, DBMS, and
> OS portions of the system, leaving the applications code intact.
Right. The OS is generally not the problem anyway. (Is VM/CMS Y2K
safe?)
> Essentially a black-box replacement, transparent to the higher levels.
> The applications code in a system like this is several orders of
> magnitude larger and more complex than the sum total of the OS, comms,
> network, and DBMS software.
Depending upon what is being used, this may or may not be the case.
Old line OS's are not that simple, then you add packages like CICS, etc...
> > Nope. No army. Trying to attack this problem with an army would
> > be mistake #1. A relatively small group would have a much better
> > shot at it.
>
> Ok, we're probably talking about 50-100 million lines of applications
> code here. There's probably a lot of it that's redundant or unused, so
> eliminating that and using the best modern techniques of OO, 4GL, code
> generation, etc, you probably only have to write 30 million new lines.
> Suppose your programmers are all as good as the best business system
> programmers, capable of churning out 30,000 lines of code a year.
> With 13 months left until 2000, and allowing no time at all to find
> out what the old stuff does, design the new system, integrate and
> test, you need only 900-some programmers. Piece of cake.
Well if you use the right tools to follow assignment chains, you have a
chance of re-doing the handling mechanisms. You will have to decide which
of several stock approaches will be used -- offset the dates, bit packing,
etc., and whether you want to run dual format, or reformat all the old
data to the new format.
Now, my little tool will let you follow the assignment chains. But
in some cases, a from-scratch redesign using off the shelf components
could be a viable alternative. Could, not should, and not always will.
Remember, a lot of that software pre-dates widespread use of shrink
wrapped packages.
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