So far, in this series, we have talked about content migration and planning. In this blog, we will focus on the importance of verification.
All migrations have the capacity to go wrong
There is no such thing as a perfect, error-free migration process. All migrations have the capacity to go wrong. Sometimes, the failure will be immediately apparent. In many cases, it might be weeks or months before a user finds their files missing or corrupt. At a minimum, I suggest the following.
Initial testing
Test all aspects of your process and every piece of software that you use in advance of your migration. I’d advise that initial technical testing is done in a non-production environment before moving to production testing. Often unpopular with IT, it is often the only way of adequately testing potential security and other issues in advance of live running.
Thoroughly test your process, too. This includes testing the process that manages the technical aspects and testing the engagement and support processes. After all, these are what the business will interact with, so they should operate smoothly and supportively to present the project in the best possible light.
Pre-migration verification
Peer review is my suggested focus for pre-migration verification. All aspects of the preparation for migration should be checked by a suitably experienced colleague within the project team.
This is especially true of the mappings that define which items are to be migrated and their destinations. Getting these wrong can easily result in accidental data breaches or leaving content behind, so both the processes and outputs of agreeing with the business should be reviewed and ensure the tooling is correctly configured with the mappings.
While more of an issue for waterfall-style migrations, data change can also impact agile migrations. That is, users change the structure of their content between the mappings being agreed upon, and the migration starts. Even if you have agreed with the business that no changes will occur, not everybody will have received the message or necessarily remember it, so immediately before the migration starts, do one last check of the mappings compared to the actual data repositories.
In-migration verification
It is common for migration jobs to run overnight or on weekends. But it would be best if you did not assume that a job will run to a successful outcome. While this can happen, in my experience, it is at least as common, if not more common, for jobs not to finish in a fully successful state. This being the case, their status should be checked.
While in some cases it may be appropriate to wait until the next working day to see if the job failed or stalled, this can be problematic if you have a tight timescale to meet or little business flexibility over timings. Ideally, it would be best if you built in automated notification or, better still, manually monitor the progress of the job so that it can be reset/restarted as close to the point of failure as possible.
Another check often overlooked is verifying that the job is reporting accurately. Just because it says it is transferring content, it doesn’t follow that it is transferring content correctly. So, as part of in-migration checks, some sampling of the destination areas should be undertaken to verify that content is being transferred.
Post-migration verification
I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Please don’t rely 100% on your migration software’s reporting. I know from personal experience just how poor this can be at times.
Once the tool has reported 100% success, you should do your own independent checks. Your checking approach will partly be driven by how much data loss/corruption is acceptable. At first, this statement might seem odd, but for example, if you transfer 100 million items and 5000 of these are somehow damaged, then a data loss of 0.00005% might be deemed acceptable. But equally, you might be tasked with 0% damage. So, your post-migration testing approach should be aligned with your requirements. It could range from simple sampling of the destination areas to writing or buying software to check that every item was successfully transferred independently.
But please remember that this data is not yours in making these decisions. You are the custodians of the data, so what you find acceptable or convenient may differ from what the business finds acceptable. So, ensure that you both work to the same requirement.
Next up: Communication – Why communication is an important part of any content migration process, and some tips on how to make the most of it.
If you have a question for Chris or the Triad team, please get in touch.
