3 Basic Tips to Data Migration Requirements for your Software Project

It’s late stage of a project, so it’s time to start worrying about your data migration requirements if you haven’t already! If you have done it, good for you! You can just stop reading. But so many projects push this to the end and then panic when it doesn’t go well. I have seen project after project have late deployments because the data was not properly migrated and tested.

Here are a few tips to consider:

1. User your data models to identify what data should be migrated. For example, you can use the boxes in Business Data Diagrams (BDDs) and you can use the data stores in Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs).

2. You can actually do a two-way check here – if you get data dumps and have fields that are not in your data models, then you may be missing a requirement.

3. Plan for a lot of time to test this. Surely someone will test the migration scripts themselves and someone is likely testing your code, but you also want to plan for testing the integration of the migrated data to the code. So often properties are not setup correctly and so the data doesn’t show up in your software, even though it’s in the database behind the scenes.