Data Migration Test Strategy - The What and Why
Data Migration Testing strategy is important to identify and understand the parties involved in all phases of testing, their responsibilities, and the individual and collective test approaches they shall follow in delivering the solution.
Once project-level test personnel, activities, responsibilities and approaches have been agreed upon through the development and review of this document, the project may enter the outlined phases of testing. Planning and execution deliverable shall be created per the activities outlined in the testing strategy document based on the common understanding of testing it provides.
The Test Strategy identifies specific activities and processes which shall be followed in executing the overall project plan. However, it assumes that the details of the activities – environments, setting up environments, inclusion of minor scope and schedule changes, etc. – are defined within the individual test stages outlined. While the general expectation of a Test Strategy is that it should be an extremely high-level, reusable document from project to project.
Here are some considerations in your Data Migration testing strategies:
Understand business and technical requirements to migrate the data
Understand migration schedules, priorities, backup, and replication, and data prioritization and value
Understand type of migration implementation to define it testing will occur in full migration or phases
Understand your end users goal for the migration
Understand your end users business process
Understand data rules, data structure, transformation logic, compliance requirements, and data priority for the migration
By defining the Testing Entrance and Exit criteria for the data migration, the stakeholders will perform an audit of the data to fix any issues.
Below are additional considerations for the testing strategy:
Identify expectations of the data capacity that will be migrated from the source to the target
Perform an audit of the source database or data sources
Ask questions when analyzing the business requirements if there are unused fields, obsolete records, platform updates, or changes to the database logic
Understand the differences and similarities between the legacy and new systems or platform
Understand storage systems capability to identify technical debt or early defects
Understand historical and archive requirements
Identify backup requirements of the source data to assist with testing strategy when moving data to the target system
Identify automated tools to assist with validating the successful move of the data
Understand the non-production and production environments to simulate data migration in a production like environment.
Understand environment refresh requirements if needed
Understand data load requirements during the migration testing process
When you identify the what and why to build out your testing strategy, a test strategy map is a great start.
