Health Service Case Study

This coupled with a strong desire to increase coverage, reduce costs and increase the speed associated with data migration testing they were keen to deliver an efficient execution capability to its internal customers and project stakeholders.

The Test, Release Management and Domain Leads on the programme recognised the importance of completing data migration testing as quickly as possible, but the traditional manual user interface and SQL scripting approach they adopted was becoming a costly bottleneck.

The requirement from the client was to recover the lost time in testing due to unforeseen blockages and speed up the process around data migration and transformation assurance. Given the critical nature of the data being transformed it was imperative that a solution was provided which mitigates the inherent risk associated with migrating sensitive and critical data in large volumes.

The Solution:

Efficient Automated Data Assurance. Implementing The Solution.

Given that the project had already been subject to significant delays, it was imperative that testing was completed on time, without any reduction in quality and coverage.

Knowing the data migration strategy and design, we decided that the most efficient approach would be to focus on a staged implementation of iData and execute our testing at each cycle of migration. One of the biggest concerns to the project was losing any patient records, and if any were lost during the migration process, at which point the record had been dropped.
We implemented iData and appropriate scripts at each stage. This provided assurance that each transformation had been assumed to be correct and provided an audit trail for any lost data and at which point the data had been dropped.

With a clear understanding of the costs and return on investment opportunities available, we began the process of establishing an automated data migration assurance solution for the execution and re-execution of tests that enable the transformation rules to be exercised every time a Transform and Load took place.

Using iData’s inbuilt learning capabilities, we edited the template scripts in-line with the transformation rules which had been stipulated by the project team. This was over 250 transformation rules that we had to reflect in our scripts.

There had been limited success with testing migrated data previously, but with our background in data migration testing coupled with iData, it was felt that using specialist help to define and implement a standardised approach would prove decisive.