Re: AS/400 upgrade costs

** Reply to note from "James W. Kilgore" <qappdsn@ibm.net> Wed, 26 Nov 1997 
08:49:17 +0000

Hi James. Saw your reply and regretted that I hadn't seen the rest of the
thread. 

> I'm not picking on you, but I think that your estimate is indicitive of how 
>the
> media has hyped up the cost of Y2K complience.
>   
> Sure it's going to take time and cost some money.  I'm not disputing that.  
>It's
> when it's stated that 4,000 programs and 500 files have to be brought to
> complience that the authors credibility goes right down the toilet in my eyes.
>   
> Let me explain...there are two types of date fields in our data base.  There 
>are
> informational dates and there are dates that trigger an action or control a
> sequencing of data.  Informational dates do not HAVE to be altered to meet Y2K
> complience.
>   
> So let's say I have a file which adds text to a transaction code on
> reports/displays, it contains a date last changed.  Guess what....I'm not 
>going
> to mess with the file nor any programs which maintain it. Don't have to.  No
> programs act upon that information, no file change required, no conversion
> program either.
>   
> Hire date for an employee? Yep, to do a seniority report.  Birth date? 
>Nope...We
> won't be hiring anyone born 2000+ until 2016.  But then again, we don't 
>perform
> any action on birth year, we do for month and day (Happy Birthday note on pay
> stub) so I'm not sure we'll ever have to deal with it.  And if our insurance
> company wanted the age of our employees, a window technique will work just 
>fine.
>   
> Invoice due date? You bettcha.  Invoice date? Don't think so.  We age by due
> date.  Things stay current until due.  Besides to do a cronological 
>transaction
> list, sort would include accounting year.  Sure Jan 2000 report would look a
> little scewed, but as long as no action is triggered, who cares.  Changing it
> isn't WORTH the cost.
>   
> So you can see that the $68,000 you mentioned is not realistic.  Therefore I 
>have
> to doubt your estimating technique and the third domino to fall would be your
> credibilitly of the estimate to develop a new application from scratch.

My God! $68,000 for fixing 4000 programs? What was he thinking! After all,
let's suppose there are actually 4000 programs there. Okay, let's say that 5%
of them actually require recoding (now, I am being a little conservative on
this as I would suspect that it would probably be higher). Okay, so now
we have a much easier 200 programs. 

So, if a programmer just re-wrote 4 a week, then he would be done in a year.
Now, I think we probably better use a senior programmer for this, because a
new guy might require us to hire a tester to make sure these fixes actually
work.

Hmm, a year's worth of a senior programmer's time counting support and
benefits makes $68,000 seem a little weak. 

But I wonder if our programmer can keep up this pace of 4 rewrites a week for
the whole year?

Do you suppose the media would blow this same conversion out of proportion by
thinking that it might take more than an average of 1.25 days per program to
review, redesign, rewrite, test/debug, implement, and do operational testing?
Or do you suppose they are blowing it out of proportion by assuming that way
too many programs will need to be modified?

Maybe they think it will take time to figure out how many programs will need
to be modified?

> JM2CW
 

Chris Rehm
Mr.AS400@ibm.net

How often can you afford to be unexpectedly out of business?
Get an AS/400.
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