UC Berkeley Year 2000 Information Departmental and Personal Computers: Find and Resolve Y2K Problems
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This page was last updated early during the year 2000 and some or all of its content may thus no longer be current or accurate.

Custom Applications: Finding & Resolving Y2K Problems

View information from the Departmental Customized Applications Subcommittee Go
Tools and techniques for resolving problems in customized applications Go

Departmental Customized Applications Subcommittee

If your or your department are using application programs on microcomputer or workstations which were "written from scratch" or extensively customized, these programs may be at significant risk of containing date-handling errors. Regardless of whether these programs were written by yourself, a colleague, your department's programmers or other staff, an outside contractor, or someone working at another institution, you'll need to carefully check them for potential Y2K problems.

The UC Berkeley campus's Year 2000 Departmental Customized Applications Subcommittee can provide you with technical guidance and resources Go to help you find & resolve such problems.

If you have any customized applications that are important to you, your department, or the UC Berkeley campus, we highly encourage you to review the information prepared by this Subcommittee.

Tools and techniques for resolving problems in customized applications

The UC Berkeley campus's Year 2000 Departmental Customized Applications Subcommittee Go has provided extensive links to tools and articles which may help you, your department's programmers, or your hired developers or consultants find and resolve Y2K problems in custom applications:

Y2K General Tools Go

Information and Tools for Specific Products Go

Some general articles on this topic which you might also find of value include:

Compliance definitions

British Standards Institution
DISC PD2000-1 A Definition of Year 2000 Conformity Requirements Go

University of Indiana
Year 2000 Compliance Guidelines Go

Compliance testing

Sun Microsystems
Year 2000 Testing Guide Go

Common problems to be aware of

Evan V. Robatino
Y2K Technical Firefighting Symptoms/Causes/Fixes Go

Bob Deskin and Mike Blackadder, Enterprise Systems Journal, Monday, October 5, 1998
Top Ten Tricky Year 2000 Problems Go

Finally, if you've created your custom application using a spreadsheet or database program, some of the general information in the following documents may also be of use:

Commercial Off-the-Shelf Applications: Finding & Resolving Y2K Problems Go
Data Files: Finding & Resolving Y2K Problems Go
Data Sharing Methods: Finding & Resolving Y2K Problems Go

What are the most common types of Y2K problems one might find in applications?

Greg Inman points out in his September/October 1998 article in the Year/2000 Journal, The Year/2000 Problem and It's Importance to UNIX Users Go, that:

After analyzing millions of lines of code, analysts found that most [Y2K] problems [in application programs] lie in several categories:

  • Hard-coded 19s
  • Calculations and comparisons involving dates formatted with two-digit years
  • Leap-year calculations
  • Sorts involving record keys with embedded dates.


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This site is provided by the campus Year 2000 Departmental Computers and Administrative Equipment Subcommittee at the University of California, Berkeley.

Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of California.
Disclaimer: The University assumes no liability if the information on this page is used for other than University purposes.