Applying Software Testing and Evaluation Techniques in Year 2000 Compliance Testing

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.