Irrespective of whether one believes that the Year 2000 (Y2K) will cause untold chaos or be just a minor blip throughout the worlds computer systems - and all points between - it does present a number of opportunities for contractors and freelance developers. This not only includes a substantial improvement in day rates each year until the end of 1999 (or 2003 if you are a pessimist) but it also gives developers an important opportunity to show that they can be very professional and deliver more cost-effective systems which give better business value than many systems do today. Of all the Y2K strategy papers currently doing the rounds, one of the best comes from British Telecom. One can clearly see the hand of new boss Peter Bonfield (formerly ICL boss) cracking the whip. BT has appointed board member Alan Earnshaw to be responsible for resolving all Y2K issues. Many directors assume that software suppliers will sort out these problems as a matter of course, don't believe that it will cost them anything and it is just media hype. There is some truth in all these excuses but, as Earnshaw has pointed out, there are also important benefits which from ensuring all systems are Y2K-compliant. These include making it much easier to do business with other Y2K-compliant sites, product churning - and an opportunity to bring all systems and networks under proper management and security as well as dumping all code and data which has either never really worked properly and/or is rarely used. This last item may sound familiar to anyone who was involved with the last compulsory great change in IT: the conversion from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency. As happened then, there were a number of similar benefits which could be derived from those sites who had a proper strategy. For example, all the mainframe suppliers were frequently guilty of conning senior managers into ordering a one inch thick printout each week which they never read. Removing such reports and spring-cleaning the site of useless and rarely-used code and data certainly freed up a lot of what was then very expensive tin - and the more cycles you can free up, the more there is available for development and testing. Just before he severed his ties with ICL, Peter Bonfield oversaw a Y2K strategy. This is headed by Alan Rowley and all sites are recommended to establish an inventory of all hardware and software, analyse what is being used and what isn't, establish a solution strategy and implement and test solutions. A full information service will also be provided on ICL's world wide web: http://www.icl.com. Most suppliers we spoke to agree that all sites need to have a spring-cleaning programme as part of their Y2K strategies. They also agree that there is unlikely to be any 'silver bullet' which will resolve all the Y2K issues and some believe there probably were enough developers around if sites changed their employment attitudes. John Elsden, a director of The Electric Software Co., pointed out that the majority of code and data was still in 3GL format using the likes of Cobol, PL/I, RPG and Fortran as well as IMS and IDMS. He added: Most of the developers with these skills tend to be either over 45 or married women. If sites change their employment policies to cover these two groups - half the UK population is now over 45 - this will help them to spring clean their systems a lot faster. Unlike decimalisation, there are a lot more tools around to help with the identification and management of fixing any problems which arise from spring-cleaning, Elsden said. Ian Hugo of Hugo Associates has done a lot of research into tools and strategies. He agreed that all most of the silver bullets would do is to automate and help manage any changes. However this only represented 10% of the total task, thus still leaving developers with 90% of the problem. Hugo advised: The Year 2000 is an immovable deadline, but there are benefits too. It gives all sites the opportunity to spring-clean their code and data - and to set up procedures to do this on a regular basis in the future. We may all have to go through this process again if Europe does decide to adopt a single currency. All the big consultancies will be closing their books on orders for Y2K compliance at the end of 1997. So my opinion is that small to medium sized concerns as well as contractors will be able to make a lot of money for a change. Therefore contractors should not sign long-term fixed price contracts early into the Y2K process. I would expect rates to rise by between 20 and 50% each year until the Y2K problem is fully resolved, he added. An important part of spring-cleaning is being able to identify just what code is where. This also allows the accounts department to properly capitalise and depreciate software, thus strengthening balance sheets. Chris Brown of ASI Europe said: Developers need to be able to identify all software. Our DCM (data collection modules) will scan everything on the host and network. this is transparent to the applications and data. Our Asset Radar software constantly scans what users are actually doing so that developers can find out what is being used and what is not. This also allows the DPM to see whether it is cheaper to buy a site licence for popular applications. This saves further money and also frees up hardware. A detailed Bios analysis will also identify all hardware connected and say which Bios need upgrading . All this information can be collected by developers so that the DPM can both save money and get better usage from existing IT infrastructure, Brown added. Dr Tony Hill of Intersolv said that software tools were also available which could detect duplicated applications. For example, when stock control systems were first put in during the 1950s and 1960s, brown paper often appeared under three titles on the manual system. Usually these were brown paper, paper brown and wrapping paper. He added: Ideally sites need to have a spring-clean every five to 10 years, so they need a strategy to manage these changes. Our tools help in configuration management. This means that developers can eliminate dead code and data without having to halt all new development. We want to work with contractors to ensure that all sites are regularly spring-cleaned. This will ensure that there is proper control of the configuration and under-used resources are made available to other developers, Dr Hill said. Graham Utton of TI Software sees three main approaches to spring-cleaning: one, change all the code; two, scrap everything and buy packages; and, three, go for transition. He believes that the first two are high risk - and therefore unrealistic, adding: Developers need to be able to deliver business benefits as well as achieving Y2K compliance. There is a lot of code and data which needs to be retired. Our tools allow the DPMs to put a methodology in place which gives a total picture of the systems. We recently did this at BT in eight weeks and this does identify what should be moved forward and what should be retired. Once developers can see what actually needs to be done, typically they can improve their personal productivity by a factor of between three and four. Typically developers expect to achieve between 10 and 15 function points per man month and with our Composer methodology, which runs in a Windows environment, they are achieving 40 to 45 function points per man month. We also encourage freelance and contract developers to train up in the methodology as it makes it easy for them to justify higher fees as well as giving us useful feedback. We do have some special deals for contractors, Utton said. Some of the tools address the problem via the Metadata layer. Typical is Wembley-based IBL and product marketing manager Mrs Pam Pipe (a former Algol programmer) said that tools suppliers had a duty to their customers to provide the means to spring-clean systems and data. She added: By looking at the Metadata layer, developers can find out who is using what and where. This means that they can go to their DPMs and ask whether those lines of code and data can be junked or not. We can also eliminate reports which are never read and rebuild databases so that all fields are up to date. I am sure that we all know of databases which have never been upgraded or cleaned up for a decade or more. This can save a lot of disc space and traffic between the host and the disc drives These tools are available in both EDA and Focus and will also allow developers to store the upgrades in more modern technologies such as DB2 or SQL Server, Mrs Pipe said. There is just one other 'minor' point about spring-cleaning: according to the 1745 Calendar Act, the Year 2000 is also a leap-year. At least one major UK bank is only allowing for 28 days in February!