It’s crunch time! Now you can find out how effective your analysis, modification, and testing really were. I know what you’re thinking: “How much trouble can two little digits really cause?” Well, how many smooth, trouble-free implementations have you ever been involved in? If you’ve experienced more than two implementations and never had a problem, you’re either the world’s luckiest person or you’re walking around with tight underpants over your trousers and a big red “S” on your shirt!
In all seriousness, don’t expect simply to put the software back into the production environment and have a fully functional system on the first try. It goes without saying that the earlier you can get the software up and running, the more time you’ll leave yourself to fix those annoying problems that always seem to crop up just as you thought it was safe to go back in the water.
Although the whole point of this conversion project is to make your applications Year 2000 compliant, you should put that aside to begin with and concentrate on ensuring that your users can continue to use the software without incident. It’s quite possible that during the conversion you might have changed some input fields to accept four-digit centuries instead of two-digit centuries. In fact, from the user’s perspective, this is probably all that’s changed. The important thing is to communicate to the users any visible changes in the applications. Before committing your software to the production environment, be sure to consider some of the following issues that, depending on the size and context of your applications, might need to be communicated to the users.