Year 2000 Computing Challenge

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has completed systems renovations and unit testing for its 42 mission-critical systems. It met the October 1, 1998, deadline set by the Office of Management and Budget for systems renovation. Since then, SBA has done integration testing and system acceptance testing to ensure that the renovated mission-critical systems will run properly after the turn of the century. Those tests were completed at the end of May of this year. Despite these efforts, weaknesses in SBA's Year 2000 testing increase the risk that its mission-critical systems are not yet Year 2000 compliant. First, SBA's integration tests are incomplete because key business processes were not specifically tested, and tests were not tracked to verify that all key business processes were actually tested. Second, system acceptance tests are incomplete because users did not review test plans, guidance, procedures, or data or participate in the tests. Third, testing of SBA's mission-critical systems has not been independently validated, and these systems have not been certified as being Year 2000 ready. Also, SBA's approach to end-to-end testing is inadequate because it (1) does not ensure that software supporting key business areas or functions has been tested and (2) leaves many potential issues, such as interoperability of internal and external systems, untested.

GAO noted that: (1) SBA completed systems renovations and unit testing for its 42 mission-critical systems, and implemented the renovated systems by the Office of Management and Budget's October 1, 1998, deadline; (2) since then, SBA performed integration testing and system acceptance testing to ensure the renovated mission-critical systems will operate correctly after the turn of the century--those tests were completed at the end of May 1999; (3) despite these efforts, however, weaknesses in SBA's year 2000 testing increase the risk that its mission-critical systems are not yet year 2000 ready; (4) SBA's integration tests are incomplete because key business processes were not specifically tested, and tests were not tracked to verify that all key business processes were actually tested; (5) system acceptance tests are incomplete because users did not review test plans, guidance procedures, or data, or participate in the tests; (6) testing of SBA's mission-critical systems has not been independently validated, and these systems have not been certified as being year 2000 ready; (7) SBA has been addressing the year 2000 problem for its external data exchanges; (8) it has reported testing or reaching agreements with 38 of its 58 external data exchange partners, including its largest, which accounts for about 90 percent of SBA's external data exchange activity; (9) SBA is continuing to pursue testing or agreements with its remaining partners; (10) in addition, SBA's approach to end-to-end testing is not adequate because it: (a) does not ensure that software supporting key business areas or functions has been tested; and (b) leaves many potential issues, such as interoperability of internal and external systems, untested; and (11) because of these testing weaknesses, SBA lacks reasonable assurance that its systems will function correctly and adequately support its key business areas and functions beyond 1999.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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