A major global financial organization in Washington D. C., USA was using Microfocus ALM to manage their requirements and QA activities. Based on organization-wide changes to their internal software development processes and policies, the customer decided to move from Microfocus ALM to Microsoft Azure DevOps Server. This created the need to migrate the existing data of Microfocus ALM to Azure DevOps to streamline their processes. Moreover, some of the bigger groups like the PLM and the International Finance team used Azure DevOps for their internal process. Thus, consolidating the data into Azure DevOps became necessary. The organizations maintain their releases and deployments through an Azure DevOps pipeline. To manage this large migration of over 2.2 million records from Microfocus ALM to Azure DevOps, the customer initially approached a very large, reputable services company that failed to perform the migration successfully. After that, the project moved to Kovair.
Challenges
Data Migration from one tool to the other always brings along certain challenges as mentioned below:
- The volume of data to be migrated from Microfocus ALM was in millions and migrating these within a 2-month time frame without automation was a mammoth task.
- Specific interrelationships were to be migrated – specific relationship link migration out of all the existing relation links was a challenging task.
- Being cross-vendor tools, one from Microfocus ALM and the other from Microsoft, data model and hierarchy are different, thus transforming data from one tool to another is a great challenge.
- Records from multiple Microfocus projects were to be migrated into Azure DevOps projects. Merging items from multiple Microfocus ALM projects to fewer structured Azure DevOps projects was another big challenge for this project.
- The organization was using several Active Directory users not having access to the Azure DevOps Organizations. Mapping and migrating those users was a challenging job.
- All Attachments and Comments associated with all Microfocus ALM artifacts including Design Steps and Call Tests needed to be migrated to Azure DevOps.
- Migration of the Last Test run was an immense challenge along with attachment. In ALM one can manipulate Test Run Steps while execution but in Azure DevOps, it does not allow you to manipulate Test Runs Steps and only allows mapped to Design Steps. Kovair migrated the orphan Test Run Steps as an HTML attachment for the Test Case.
Last but not the least, the management also wanted to get the full report from the tool to minimize the manual effort of migration sanity check after the entire migration was over. All these challenges added up to the complexity of the data migration.
Kovair Solution
In the first step of the migration, the Kovair team learned the data structure and reached a consensus with the client on the migration use cases. Kovair used its data migration and synchronization product QuickSync to migrate the data.
The QuickSync tool was installed on a server at the client’s organization. Before initiating the configuration of QuickSync, Kovair analyzed the existing data structure of Microfocus ALM Projects and confirmed with the client the field and artefact mapping. After this, the configuration was done on a project-by-project basis. The entire configuration was achieved through simple mouse clicks without the need for any coding. As there were over 87 projects to be migrated, the client preferred to conduct parallel migrations. Every project went through the parallel phases of configuration from the field and artefact mapping, data migration and data validation post-migration from multiple hosts. Initially, we performed two small proof of concept projects in the client’s staging environment and once they were satisfied with the outcome, migration of production data took place.
Kovair QuickSync also facilitates real-time monitoring of the migration. The volume of successful and failed transactions could be monitored from one single Quick Sync window. If any failed migration took place, the detail level logs were maintained which provided the root cause for each of the individual failures. This detailed level of information helped identify the root cause to any failures. After the completion of a major part of migration, the Kovair team performed a meticulous data sanity check both manually and with automation. We found that approximately 5% of the data did not migrate due to a condition mismatch during migration. Kovair did validate the data at source and respected target and then re-migrated the residual items. After the second pass, 100% of data was migrated with zero data loss. With Kovair QuickSync, organizations can be assured that no data loss will occur.
Fig: Data Hierarchy between Microfocus ALM and Azure DevOps
Kovair QuickSync Summary
- Turnkey solution based upon the transaction volume of data across all configurations and projects for any number of users.
- Easy tool installation and quick initial setup.
- Codeless configuration for mapping the Microfocus ALM Projects, Entities and Fields to the Azure DevOps counterparts.
- Ability to migrate multiple projects including Requirements, Tests, Test Runs and Defects to Azure DevOps.
- Easy monitoring reports provided an objective, statistical view of the state of the migration with reports and logs.
- Provided a retry mechanism for any unsuccessful migration.
- Boosted migration speed by running the migration in parallel from multiple servers using a multi-hosting capability
- 100% migration completion with zero errors
With all these unique aspects and capabilities of migrating data from legacy tools, Kovair QuickSync provided a very elegant solution for their data migration needs.
Conclusion
As the world gets more digitally connected, data migrations have increased in complexity and need. Many companies are reluctant to to venture into data migration having understood the difficulties in getting it done accurately. Kovair QuickSync provides a perfect solution for fast and secure data migration for any size migration. Its numerous features and benefits make it an excellent choice to accomplish an error-free and turnkey secure data migration.
The requirement to migrate more than 87 projects in a short period of time with zero downtime was a huge challenge for this global financial institution. Kovair QuickSync successfully migrated the entire set of data within the given time without a single minute of downtime, with migrations occurring around the clock.
Kovair QuickSync has assisted many organizations in moving their valuable data easily from one tool to another. QuickSync is easy to install and manage, and provides an array of immediate benefits. If you are considering a data migration, do not hesitate to learn more by contacting us to discuss it. Move forward with confidence with Kovair.