There is no universal, standard approach that can
be used to cost the Year 2000 correction efforts.
Year 2000 correction efforts can generally be categorized
into the four steps above. Each system may only require the
execution of some of the steps, depending on the nature of the system's
Year 2000 problems and the specifics of the system's life-cycle and
operational situation. Additionally, some system Year 2000 "fixes"
may include hardware replacements and upgrades.
For systems requiring all of the steps, the cost will
still be a function of several factors including: the types of Year
2000 problems facing the system, the chosen solutions, the efficiency
of the maintenance workforce making the corrections, the languages in
the system, the type of application, and the level and complexity of
testing required. To get an understanding of how the Year 2000 problems
will impact military systems, we analyzed a range of applications from
across the services. They included Ground and Airborne Radar Systems,
Communications Processing Systems, Command and Control (C2) Planning
Systems, and Logistics Support Systems. For these types of systems our
analysis showed a range of cost, calculated as a function of the executable
lines of code, as follows:
- Ground and Airborne Radar Systems ($2.02 - $8.52)
- Communications Processing Systems ($1.23 - $5.54)
- C2 Planning Systems ($1.22 - $1.84)
- Logistics Support Systems ($1.02 - $1.39)
However, these costs may not be what real systems experience. For example, if a system is under maintenance with scheduled
releases and upgrades, the Year 2000 changes can be rolled into the ongoing
changes for testing and fielding purposes, thus avoiding separate Year
2000 activities for these two steps. This is especially significant for
systems which require test ranges and test vehicles or that require secure
operation and have high availability requirements, since the testing and
fielding steps for these systems are extremely expensive and complex.
There is typically more to Y2K remediation than merely finding
and fixing errors in software code. In addition to cross-cutting
management planning and engineering reviews, it will also be necessary
to test all aspects of systems operations throughout the enterprise, not
just software, in order to be sufficiently confident that all other major
system elements, including COTS components, embedded chips, and interfaces
to other systems, are free from Y2K infection.
Even under the fortunate circumstances where very few Y2K software bugs are actually found (i.e., see a very low "dollars per line
code"), certain enterprise level costs from management reviews, planning,
analysis, engineering assessments, expanded scope of testing, unique installation
problems, and documentation should also be added to the software-level
costs to arrive at the total cost of Y2K. Additional costs for contingency
and backup measures also need to be included in the total cost of dealing
with Y2K. Y2K remediation activities may go significantly beyond the labors
of the software programming group. In fact, significant Y2K remediation
costs could possibly still be incurred in situations where there very
little or no software.
For More Information
For more specific details on costing see the Cost
Estimate Details. For further costing information, take a look at
the February 1997 briefing entitled A Framework
for Estimating the Cost of Fixing the Year 2000 Problem and the 2
April briefing and paper entitled Analyzing
the Costs of System-of-Systems Year 2000 Problem Resolution on our
Briefings page.
See the MITRE Assessment Briefing
and Executive Summary for a fuller presentation
on the Y2K story.
