10 | 1998

Introduction
Ed Yourdon

Picture This: Scenario-Driven Contingency Planning for the Year 2000 Problem
Howard Rubin

Cramming for the Year 2000 Test
Michael Mah

Special Challenges in Year 2000 Project Management
Paul Neuhardt

The Ultimate Employee Retention Program
Steve Heller

Pinning Down the Utilities: Key Year 2000 Compliance Questions on Embedded Systems
Roleigh Martin



The Year 2000 phenomenon continues to be a schizophrenic one for the IT industry, if not for society as a whole. While more and more mainstream politicians, business leaders, and media journals describe the "millennium bug" as potentially devastating, the majority of citizens and small business owners blithely ignore the possibility that it may disrupt their lives in a mere 15 months. And while 25% of the IT professionals work feverishly to repair mainframes, PCs, and embedded systems, the other 75% act as if the problem didn't exist. The October 1998 issue of Software Development magazine, for example, contains 80 pages of excellent discussions of application development tools and methods, but only a single reference to "the Y2000 distraction," buried in the middle of an article about Java.