Testing cloud services – Testing migrations

When an organization is going to use a service for an existing business process, a migration process is necessary. This will also be needed when use of a service ends—for instance, in case of switching to another supplier. This can be planned, but also unplanned (contract termination, bankruptcy). The discussion of migration in this section mainly concerns data transfer. Data in this case means information. In a migration, there are a number of scenarios:

• Transfer into the cloud, where the applications remain the same (can be done with IaaS or PaaS). The data is only moved to another location.
• Transfer to SaaS. The data from the existing application needs to be migrated to the new service.
• Transfer from one SaaS to another SaaS. This will show a lot of similarities to the second scenario.
• Transfer out of the cloud. In most cases this will also mean a full data migration, similar to the second scenario.

Checklist test measures ’testing migration’

• 5.7.1 Migration test strategy
  • Interruption to business processes is minimal.
  • All migrated data can be tracked (audit trail).
  • All data is converted correctly.
  • All transactions that were pending before migration are successfully completed after the migration (or finished before migration takes place).
  • Defects in data before migration do not lead to problems during migration.
  • Defects in data are solved and not migrated in their defective state (optional requirement).
  • No more data than necessary is migrated to the service (no unnecessary data, no sensitive information unintentionally migrated).
• 5.7.2 Minimal interruption of business processes
  • The most important business processes. To do this, process-oriented test cases are needed, tuned to the (possibly altered) user process.
  • The correct import of data (is the data profile correct?).
  • The potentially changed way in which data is used.
  • The correct build-up of data history (correct order, with correct date and time).
  • Vulnerable aspects, such as letter accents.
  • Trial migration
• 5.7.3 Correct data migration in IaaS and PaaS
• 5.7.4 Correct data conversion with SaaSDo conversion rules work correctly?
  • Does the conversion work properly on the input data?
  • Is there any data lost?
  • Are any partially completed transactions lost?
  • During and after conversion, does any sensitive data remain available?
  • Is too much data being transferred to the service through migration?
• 5.7.5 Migration performance
  • Speed.
  • Infrastructure capacity.
  • Stability at full volume.
• 5.7.6 Data cleanup
• 5.7.7 Test environment migration
• 5.7.8 Parallel runs and trial runs