Will Progress applications survive Y2K?

The more than 500 organisations in South Africa which have developed applications using the Progress database and software products are at risk of their systems not being Y2K-compliant. This is the warning from Don Elliott, MD of MIP Consulting, a division of MIP Holdings, a leading Progress software house.

Elliott says that despite the fact that all versions of Progress fully support four-digit years using 99/99/9999, and have done so since 1985, it is not unusual to encounter Year 2000 "errors" in Progress applications.

"If dates are handled as Progress date types, Y2K should not be a problem. But if dates are handled by any other means, Progress is not in control and the century change may not take place properly.

"One of the biggest problems is that not all software houses have stuck to the official Progress design and programming rules," says Elliott. "The Progress environment is considered very easy to learn and junior programmers need a relatively short training period before becoming productive. However, these junior programmers may not be fully conversant with all the rules.

"Classic errors include programmers using their own algorithms to determine in which century a particular date should be placed or deciding on a year by using a loop running from 1900 to 2000."

With time running out in the countdown to the Year 2000, MIP has sourced the Pro2000 Y2K scanning tool from Dutch company Vitalogic. The Pro2000 tool scans applications running against Progress databases to obtain an impact analysis of the remediation requirement. Its major benefit is that it fast-tracks Y2K projects by locating all the errors and bugs in an application, giving a full audit report of which lines need to be reprogrammed, which lines have potential problems and suggested solutions. It scans between 20 000 and 40 000 lines of code an hour, completing a 100 000-line application in about two-and-a-half hours.

"We are offering Pro2000 analysis at the rate of 20c per line of code," says Elliott.

"With the short time left to Y2K," adds Elliott, "IT managers need to understand how risky it is to allow programmers to do manual code checking. In a recent test, we ran Pro2000 through code that had ostensibly been manually checked and found programmers had missed 30% of the problems, mainly due to human error."