Allscripts Successfully Migrated Data from HP ALM 12.55 to TFS 2015 Using Kovair QuickSync

Introduction

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. is an American company from the domain of Healthcare Management providing a wide range of services like physician practices, hospitals management, and electronic health records just to name a few. Until now the company used HP ALM 12.55 to manage their Requirements, Tests, and Defects. Due to change in the internal software development processes and policies, the organization decided to move to TFS 2015 for managing their Requirements, Tests, and Defects. This implied that all the data residing under different artifacts across all the designated projects in HP ALM needed to be migrated to TFS 2015. It is not only the records but also the links between these items under the specific area paths needed to be migrated from HP ALM to TFS.

Challenges

The migration project was easier said than done! The crucial challenges that were addressed are mentioned in the points below.

• The data that was to be migrated in terms of volume was in hundreds of thousands and replicating the data from the source to the destination manually would have been time-consuming and error-prone.
• Since the two tools were from separate vendors, there was no inherent inter-connectivity between the tools.
• Both HP ALM and TFS maintain the data in different ways and thus moving them in the correct format to the right location was pivotal for the project.
• Finally, the most necessary feature was maintaining the quality of data that was to be migrated and ensuring that no data gets lost in the process.
• Real-time monitoring of the migration status and performing a sanity check on the migrated data was an essential parameter as well.

Kovair Solution

In pursuit of the appropriate tool that will cater to their need in the best way possible, Allscripts approached Kovair for the QuickSync Migration Solution. As a part of the initial activity, Kovair understood the data structure of their existing HP ALM projects and came to a consensus on the migration use cases with AllScripts team. After analyzing the existing data, considering the time for completion and the volume of records to migrate, Kovair proposed multiple QuickSync instances so that the migration can take place in parallel from multiple instances. All instances were provided by AllScripts to carry on this migration. With minimal manual effort, the tool was installed in all the Servers. Post-installation, the effort mainly consisted of mapping the Projects, Entities, and Fields between HP ALM and TFS. Once this setup was complete, the rest was a quick automatic process and required very few mouse clicks to achieve in a complete codeless manner. The migration ensured that artifact hierarchy is maintained while data is getting migrated.

• The top-level Test Scenario Folder of HP ALM got migrated into TFS as the Test Plan folder.
• The HP ALM Test Scenario subfolders 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 also migrated.

Fig: Data Hierarchy between HP ALM and TFS

Kovair QuickSync also facilitated users to have real-time monitoring of the migration. The volume of successful and failed transactions could be monitored from one single window. In case of failed migration, detail level logs were maintained which provided root cause for each of the individual failures. This detailed level of information helped to identify the root cause behind most of the failures. These records were then re-migrated after the problems were fixed. The entire migration happened for 800,000 records with <.01% error.

Kovair QuickSync Business Values

• Easy tool installation and quick initial setup.
• Complete codeless configuration for mapping HP ALM projects, entities, and fields to corresponding TFS counterparts.
• Successfully migrated 11 projects from HP ALM to TFS with a high volume of linked artifacts.
• Each record having multiple links were migrated at a rate of 60 records per hour.
• Easy monitoring capabilities having an objective and subjective statistical view of the state of migration with reports and logs.
• Retry mechanism for any unsuccessful migration.
• Turnkey solution based upon the transaction volume of data across all configurations and projects for any number of users.
• 100% migration with <.01 % failure.

Project Execution Overview

A pilot POC project was done at the staging server of AllScripts to verify the capabilities of the QuickSync tool. The result was so satisfying that the Allscripts team moved forward with direct implementation in the Production instance. The Production implementation was done in 3 phases. In the first phase, the Kovair team reviewed the existing structure of data, project mappings and the field mappings based on the configuration of the production instances of HP ALM & TFS. Post analysis, we defined the mappings as required to fit their use cases. In the second phase, the configurations in QuickSync were done based on the mapping with a minimal manual effort. Finally, after the configuration was complete in all the provided servers, migration was started in parallel to complete the process faster. The occasional errors that occurred during data migration, were resolved in minimum time based on the detailed level information provided by QuickSync which helped to identify the root cause of the problems easily. During the entire process of migration, the client team members were also provided training sessions so that they can have a better knowledge about the capabilities of QuickSync. Post-training, the team members were able to perform the modifications that were required and monitoring of the activities with minimum assistance from Kovair.

Conclusion

Kovair QuickSync allowed AllScripts to overcome all challenges of data migration and move from HP ALM 12.55 to TFS 2015 within a few months in an incremental manner. The complete data got successfully moved from HP to TFS by maintaining the hierarchy and relationships of the record across artifacts.