Need for Data Migration
Many organizations today prefer to change their existing legacy tools into modernized applications for various reasons like enhanced features, ease of use, increased productivity, and better quality. Several other factors such as mergers and acquisitions, consolidation of tools at organizational level, regulatory compliance also influences organizations to change their existing tools. Other than the technical challenges as mentioned in the next section, migration of tools and its data also comes with different types of business challenges like —
- Large volume of data
- Huge manual effort if no migration tools are available
- Must be done at minimum downtime due to large number of active daily users
- Requirement of maintaining traceability and history of changes
- Requirement of maintaining data accuracy
Though enterprises are spending significant amounts of dollars on migrating data from their existing tools to the newly procured tools, most of the times these migration exercises seem to be non-satisfactory.
Technical Challenges of Data Migration
Among the different types of Data Migration, Storage and Database Data migrations are straight forward since they deal with linear data extraction and loading. Migration process becomes challenging with Development Tools Data Migration, since the tools usually come from several vendors each carrying different data schema and access interfaces. The common technical challenges faced during migration are:
- Handling ASCII and UTF file.
- Disparity and Complexity of Data Formats in different tools.
- Poor data quality in the source tool.
- Absence of data governance policies.
- Reduce the system downtime migrating data conditionally to ensure clean data in the target tool.
- Real-time monitoring of the progress of data migration.
- Failure to validate and test the data migration process.
- Need for migrating data from single consolidated to multiple specialized tools
What is Kovair QuickSync?
Kovair QuickSync is a comprehensive and cost-effective solution that offers a one stop solution for all the development tools data migration needs for any enterprise. Being a Windows-based desktop solution, Kovair QuickSync can be installed and used easily and it requires minimum infrastructure and associated low cost. It not only helps enterprises to migrate the data from one source to one target tool but also helps migrate data from one source to multiple targets. Its intuitive UI makes it easily adaptable to the users.
QuickSync offers the following salient features that can cater to any business and technical challenges of migration.
- Highly scalable to accommodate large volumes of data. Multiple parallel setups can be created across multiple hosts.
- Negligible system downtime during migration.
- Supports synchronization of data post migration to facilitate phase-wise roll out.
- Migrates records, attachments, comments, and rich text data.
- Migrates and retains links between artifacts.
- Supports Transformation and Overriding of data.
- Automated data validation Using Data Checker.
- Allows re-execution of error items.
- Supports SSL, TLS1.1 and TLS 1.2 enabled tools.
- Minimum manual effort for data content validation by providing on-screen side-by-side comparison.
- Supports migration of automated Test cases in case of testing tool data migration.
- Provides graphical reports to monitor migration health on an hourly, daily or monthly basis
- Supports reflow of erroneous data
- Supports migration of data from one single consolidated tool to multiple specialized tools
Migration of Data from One Source to Multiple Target Tools
Kovair QuickSync provides an end to end migration solution for migrating data from one source tool to multiple target tools based on the type of artifact it is trying to migrate the data from.
Let us consider an organization currently using HP ALM to manage various types of artifacts like Requirements, Tests and Defects decides to replace HP ALM with IBM Jazz CLM suite. Hence all data currently residing in HP ALM needs to be migrated to 3 different tools RDNG, RQM & RTC of Jazz platform.
Based on the compartmentalized Jazz entity management framework, the migration need is to move selective artifacts to specific tool based on the artifact type. Requirements are to be migrated to RDNG, Tests to RQM and Defects to RTC. Additionally, all attachments and comments associated with each of the artifacts, and rich text data also need to be migrated. Additionally, the traceability links like Requirement Coverage, Test Coverage and Defect Coverage as they exist between the various artifacts in HP ALM are to be migrated.
A single installation of Kovair QuickSync is completely equipped to provide an end to end seamless migration solution to the above described scenario – migrating artifact wise data to specific tools
- All Requirements will be migrated to RDNG, Tests to RQM and Defects to RTC
- Attachments, Rich Text, Comments will be migrated
- All relation links will be automatically converted to OSLC links and migrated to RDNG, RQM and RTC.
The following screenshot shows that a single instance of QuickSync being used to connect an HP ALM instance and to all the Jazz suite of tools – RDNG / RRC, RQM and RTC.
Along with migration, Kovair QuickSync is powered to support real-time synchronization of data between HP ALM and Jazz suite of tools.
Not only between HP ALM and Jazz, Kovair Quicksync can provide similar migration solution for other “One to Many” type of tool combinations as well like CA Agile Central to Jazz, Jira to Jazz and also between two instances of Jazz as well.
Success of QuickSync
Kovair QuickSync has been trusted, used and appreciated by several Small, Medium and Fortune 500 companies globally. Kovair QuickSync has carried out large number of migration projects in less than 2 years since its launch. Some of the Customer testimonials and Case Studies are available on Kovair Website. Some of the accolades of Kovair QuickSync are:
- 100% success rate in all the migration projects.
- More than 90% of the migration projects completed ahead of predetermined schedule.
- Migrated over 2000 tools projects of various ALM tools.
- Migrated more than 5 million of data across various ALM tools.
- Less than 0.1% transaction error rate in all the executed projects.
Testimonial
“Kovair’s newly introduced QuickSync product is by far the most efficient solution for accurately migrating data structures into Microsoft TFS. We had to migrate data from 10 HP ALM projects to Microsoft TFS and tried several other methods without success. Kovair’s product was very effective for us, and their team was flexible to work within our schedule” – Brad Ryba, Director, QA EDMC.