Data migration testing strategy

Taken straight from the Data Migration Pro article "How to Implement an Effective Data Migration Testing Strategy".

Recommendations for Designing a Data Migration Test Strategy

In the context of data and content migrations, business and compliance risks are a direct result of migration error. A thorough testing strategy minimizes the likelihood of data and content migration errors.

The list below provides a set of recommendations to define such a testing strategy for a specific system:

1. Establish a comprehensive migration team, including representatives from the user community, IT and management. Verify the appropriate level of experience for each team member and train as required on data migration principles, the source and the destination system.
2. Analyze business and compliance risks with the specific systems being migrated. These risks should become the basis for the data migration testing strategy.
3. Create, formally review and manage a complete migration specification – while it’s easy to state, very few migrations take this step.
4. Verify the scope of the migration with the user community and IT. Understand that the scope of the migration may be refined over time as pre- and post-migration testing may reveal shortcomings of this initial scope.
5. Identify (or predict) likely sources of migration error and define specific testing strategies to identify and remediate these errors. This gets easier with experience and the error categories and conditions listed here provide a good starting point.
6. Use the field-level source-to-destination mappings to establish data requirements for the source system. Use these data requirements to complete pre-migration testing. If necessary, cleanse or supplement the source data as necessary.
7. Complete an appropriate level of post migration testing. For migrations where errors need to be minimized, 100% verification using an automated tool is recommended. Ensure that this automated testing tool is independent of the migration tool.
8. Look closely at the ROI of automated testing if there is some concern about the costs, time commitment or the iterative nature of migration verification via sampling.
9. Complete User Acceptance Testing with migrated data. This approach tends to identify application errors with data that has been migrated as designed.
10. Test the production run. If an automated testing tool was chosen, it is likely that 100% of the migrated data can be tested here with minimal incremental cost or downtime. If a manual testing approach is being used, complete a summary verification.