Neuzil was lucky. He had enough time to fix the problem. But for those companies just starting their audits, time is short. The biggest danger, Neuzil says, is that most program managers may not realize the code is gone until it's too late. Source code is lost all the time.
Source code is compiled or interpreted to become executable code.
Executable code may run in a company's computer systems for decades, but if the program remains unchanged, the source code may be backed up into archives and sent off-site. Whatever the cause, vanishing code is a serious problem that could make Y2K remediation that much harder. Gartner Group estimates that as much as 5 percent of source code is unaccounted for. Back to the drawing board Figuring out what code is gone is only half the problem. A fix means rewriting it from scratch, a time-consuming task that only made sense if you started a few years ago.