as given the figure of approximately between US$0.50 to $2 per line of source code for modification, with these costs expected to escalate as much as 50 per cent for every year that projects are delayed. Unfortunately, this average excludes date conversions on military weapons systems software, which is expected to be significantly more expensive to convert, and the real figure should even be much larger. One of the first steps an organisation needs to take on the way to ensuring Year 2000 compliance is to determine what they have to be changed. The business will need to prepare an inventory of hardware and software utilised to allow assessment of problem areas. It is hard to address the potential for problems when no clear picture of the problem space is available. Documentation showing the processing steps being performed by the company's computer system in order to accomplish business functions needs to be available to ensure that all procedures are present and accounted for. There is no "Silver Bullet" The problem looks straightforward, all we need is just to check each line of code, locate the two-digit date fields, expand them to four digit and test the correction. Unfortunately, these modifications are mostly manual labour not an automatic process. Software Dilemma Six-digit date fields are generally scattered throughout practically every level of computing, from operating systems to software applications and databases. Some dates have numeric representation, while other have alphanumeric representations. This adds to the complexity of the problem from a management and technical point of view. The bug contaminates a large area that nearly all of the program codes must be examined to ensure that correction is free from side-effects. A case in point, a typical medium size organisation, a state comptroller's office in United States, is predicted to spend US$5.6 million to $6.2 million to make the software conversion, that is, nearl...
