Companies behind on their year 2000 conversion programs may take comfort from IBM Corp’s new quick fix date-change tools, announced yesterday. The Armonk, New York-based systems and services giant said the tools, Runtime Analyzer and the Millennium Runtime Windowing Tool, are designed to work on IBM’s S/390 parallel enterprise servers or other large servers running MVS. A third tool, the Unit Test Assistant, helps organizations test applications that have already been updated for Y2K compliance, Big Blue said. Both quick fix tools are designed to reduce fixing time by identifying bug problems while the applications are running. Runtime Analyzer searches out and identifies potential errors in critical business applications and developers then go into the application and adjust the date field manually. The Millennium Runtime Windowing Tool does the same as the above only it also fixes the problems in real-time, while the application is running. It will be generally available in December 1998, along with the Unit Test Assistant tool, while Runtime Analyzer is available now.
