DST: Do Some Testing
Are your DST woes over?
Are you sure?
Many of the problems that several of our customers experienced due to the change in daylight savings dates this past spring could have been either prevented or worked around easily if some testing had been done earlier. Admittedly, even some of our products at Microsoft had some issues we didn't catch in our testing, such as the SentOn date in CDOSys. During the weeks leading up to the new start of DST, our support-call volume increased by several orders of magnitude. It seems everyone was feeling the pain and needed our help to iron out their problems. Many of the cases we worked during those weeks could have been worked in December or January after we released our patches for Windows and could have avoided the "CRITSIT" status many of them took on.
Several customers decided a change to their code was necessary to accommodate a flexible DST time. Some customers decided that they just needed to run a batch job to fix some data. Some decided both were necessary. Still some others were simply waiting on tools or updates from Microsoft on our APIs on which their application depended. Surprisingly, the first week of DST settled down a bit. The next few weeks after that revealed only some straggling one-off issues related to DST. Now, 2 months later and almost 2 months since the previous DST start date has past, it would seem our DST days are behind us…but I fear they are not.
There is another "window" coming up in November. Remember that DST was extended into March AND into November. If your application relies on dates or time calculations, you should be testing your application now for the November DST window. Make sure the changes you made still work. We don't want to go through that again, and I'm confident you don't either. No one could have predicted Congress would spend their time changing DST dates instead of working on problems of our day, but they did give us plenty of warning (almost 2 years). We all need to do our due-diligence and ensure that November doesn't become the new March.