Determining Work Units in Year 2000 Maintenance Projects

The dominant issue for software management at the end of this century is to make information systems year 2000 compliant. The respective changes of programs and data stores need very high human and system resources. Not all programs and data stores can be converted at once; therefore, work units that consist of those programs and data stores that will be changed simultaneously have to be determined.In this paper, a hierarchical planning procedure to construct appropriate work units is developed. It combines a cluster identification algorithm, a branch-and-bound technique and a greedy heuristic. The solution obtained also shows whether the planner can expect the project to be finished in time with the resources available. The procedure has been implemented in the prototype FUSE2000 (Fusion & Sequence); the application of this prototype is illustrated by an example.