Summary: 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.
