Treating Content Migration Like a Real Project

13-May-2010

I was reading the excellent Web Site Migration Handbook by our good friend and colleague David Hobbs -- and a quick Twitter exchange with him got me thinking about the importance of testing and QA in migration.

Most organizations do not undertake a migration effort with the rigor and discipline that they normally would for a software project. The result is often a failed migration. You should treat a content migration project like any other major software project in terms of execution. What this means is that you should deploy a proper methodology for implementing migrations.

A typical software development methodology has the following phases at a high level:

Analysis
Design
Implementation
Testing
Deployment

The following table maps the activities that you carry out in a software development phase with the activities that should be carried out for a migration project. Remember though that depending on your chosen methodology, there may often be some overlap of activities between different project phases. As an example, a prototype or a PoC will usually start in the Design phase but will continue even in the implementation phase. Also, the table does not map all the possible activities but only high level ones in an attempt to map them with a formal SDLC.

Activities in Software Development	Activities in Migration
Requirement Analysis Functional Specifications	Conduct Site/Content Inventory Identify content types Identify content that will not be migrated Identify content parameters like type, owner, size, last modified, name, location, audience, importance and so forth Analysis of the above Frequency and complexity Relationships “Common-ness” between different content items Taxonomy and Metadata assessment
Architecture Design High Level Design Low Level Design	Map content from source to destination Map metadata from source to destination Map users and roles Identify gaps and strategies for them Decide how much of manual and how much of automated migration can be done Decide big bang Vs Incremental migration Prototype or Proof-of-Concept Design of import and export scripts Test and QA plans
Implementation Coding Unit Testing	Development of migration scripts and utilities Unit Testing of these scripts and utilities The actual migration (both automated and manual) Post extraction refinement
System Testing Integration Testing Regression Testing User Acceptance Testing	Test and QA different migration scenarios: default values getting populated properly data type mapping between source and destination user and roles mapping Performance testing of scripts User Acceptance Testing Content Quality
Deployment	System roll over System roll out Post migration refinements

Depending on whether you use Waterfall, Iterative, RUP, Agile or some other methodology, there will be variations in the way you carry out some of the migration activities. However, the point is that you should treat content migration just like you would treat any other project and give it the respect it deserves.