Introduction

EDMC is one of the largest chain of education institutions imparting private post-secondary education across the US. They use HP ALM to manage their Testing and QA activities. Several internal reasons, like changes in their internal software development processes and policies made the organization decide to move from HP ALM to Microsoft TFS. This meant all the accumulated data in HP ALM needed to be migrated to TFS where the future QA activities would be performed. The HP ALM Projects containing the QA data needed to be moved to TFS with the test related data organized in the TFS Area Paths. With this data migration objective, the company approached Kovair for a suitable and cost-effective solution.

Challenges

The migration of data was easier said than done. Firstly, the volume of stored data in HP ALM was in hundreds of thousands of records and moving them manually to TFS was not an easy option. Secondly, since these tools are from different vendors there was no inherent interconnectivity between these tools. Thirdly, HP ALM and TFS have stark differences in the way the data is organized within the tools. All these made the moving and organizing of data to TFS a complicated mission to achieve. Last but not the least, the primary concern of the migration was the quality of the data getting migrated which calls for real-time data validation and sanity check. As for the Test Data in HP ALM, there were multiple Custom Test Plan Folders and Custom Sub Test Folders under which the HP ALM Tests were to be organized. In TFS, however, there were a single Test Plan Folder and several Test Suite Folders containing the Test Cases along with the Test Steps organized as per the TFS Area Path. In addition, certain test cases contained attachments and linked Defects which needed to be replicated in TFS. The biggest challenge for Kovair was to understand the discrete data hierarchy of HP ALM and align it to TFS so that the business data remains intact.

Kovair Solution

Kovair, in the first phase of migration started to work towards migrating the data of HP ALM to TFS Development instance for EDMC. Understanding the data structure and reaching a consensus on the migration use case was the first step towards it. Kovair used its recently released product ‘QuickSync’ as the solution for migrating the data. The QuickSync tool was installed in a server of this organization. Setting up the integration involved a negligible manual effort. This effort mainly consisted of mapping the Projects, Entities, and Fields between HP ALM and TFS. Once done, the rest of the migration was a swift automated process. The configurations were codeless in nature and only required mouse clicks. The migration took care of the most complex challenge – the contrasting data structure in the following ways:

• The top level Test Plan Folder of HP ALM got migrated into TFS as the Test Plan folder.
• The HP ALM Test Plan sub folders were migrated as Test Suites in TFS under which the HP ALM Tests were migrated as Test Cases of TFS.
• The linked artifacts of Test Cases like Test Steps, Call to Tests and the Attachments were migrated to TFS.
• Along with the Test Cases, the corresponding attachments were migrated as well. Subsequently, the HP ALM Defects were migrated as Bugs to TFS.
• All the links that existed between the HP ALM Tests and Defects were migrated as well.

Fig: The Data Structure of HP ALM and TFS and their Mapping during Migration through QuickSync

Kovair QuickSync also facilitated the users to view the statistics of migration. The total number of successful and failed migration could be viewed from QuickSync. In case of failed migration, the detailed log of the objects and the reasons for failure were available from one of the built-in monitoring reports of QuickSync.

Business Values

• Easy tool installation and quick initial setup.
• Codeless configuration for mapping the HP ALM Projects, Entities and Fields to the TFS counterparts.
• Successfully migrated 32 HP ALM Projects to TFS within a month.
• Easy monitoring capabilities having objective and subjective statistical view of the state of migration with reports and logs.
• Retry mechanism for any unsuccessful migration.
• Simple licensing based on the successful transactions across all configurations and all projects by any number of users.
• 100% Migration with zero tolerance failure.

The Project Execution Overview

In the first stage of the migration project, Kovair team completed the necessary tool configurations such as creating connections, mapping projects, mapping users, mapping entities, creating business flow and installing windows service. Once done, the migration occurred automatically without the need of continuous supervision. In the second stage of the project, team members of the organization were given a few hours of training on the various facets of the QuickSync tool and how to accomplish migration goals with it. Post training, the teams were able to manage the migration themselves using the QuickSync tool with a minimal assistance from Kovair. The occasional errors occurred when data moved in incorrect format and mapping of field values were not supported in TFS. The trained team were able to ascertain the cause of errors with the monitoring mechanisms available with QuickSync tool and took corrective measures as required. In half a month, the second and last stage of the migration was completed much to the satisfaction of the organization.