Data migrations are a critical part of digital transformation projects. Business modernization imperatives drive system upgradation decisions. Situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies to adopt online technologies that necessitate migrating data into the new systems or share with external applications. The complexity of the systems and the quantity of data impacts the degree of risk involved in such projects. Risk containment and opportunity development are at the core of system migrations.
Data migration experience in a retail business project
A fast growing retail chain with operations spread across Middle East, Asia and Far East was in the midst of a system migration and modernization project, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck and added to the implementation challenges.
Qapitol QA had the opportunity to partner with the company for its quality engineering initiatives because of our expertise in working with identical systems and prior experience in retail system migration and modernization projects. The following sections describe the quality assurance & testing challenges and the automation solutions provided.
- Project Type: Data migration
- Systems involved: SAP Hana, Azure SQL server, SAP Commerce Cloud, IBM Power System
- Target Countries: GCC, India, Far East (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore)
Challenges in migrating legacy data
- As part of the transformation requirements, the client had migrated a database from SAP Hana to Azure SQL Server and had also upgraded SAP Commerce Cloud CCV1 to CCV2.
- QA practices were not fully established and testing was being performed in silos.
- The requirement documents were ambiguous and no documentation was maintained for testing the end to end functional flows of the application.
- There was limited test coverage across end to end workflows and for third party integrations such as with Payments and Vouchers apps.
- The performance of the system was not validated nor was user-experience testing performed
Establishing quality engineering processes for testing and monitoring applications and databases
The Qapitol QA team gained a comprehensive understanding of the requirements and business logics by closely coordinating with client’s business development teams.
- The team established a knowledge management repository by documenting comprehensive functional requirements in various formats.
- Streamlined testing processes by analyzing gaps and implemented QA best practices.
- Created reusable test assets such as for test strategy, test plan, test cases, checklists etc.
- Performed comprehensive functional testing, UI testing, localization analysis, cross-browser testing covering the all the application modules – Order Management, Returns, Refunds, Payments, Vouchers, Stock management, Delivery models and more.
- Verified functionality of mobile applications across nine Android & iOS devices.
- Built region specific (GCC, India, Far East) regression test suites.
- Developed and executed performance test scripts using Jmeter. JMeter is a software that can perform load test, performance-oriented business (functional) test, regression test, etc., on different protocols or technologies. (https://jmeter.apache.org/)
- Conducted multiple load test runs with various load patterns (500, 1000, 1500 concurrent users) and identified baseline response times.
- Identified performance bottlenecks of both web & mobile application and provided recommendations.
Business modules and system components tested
- Hybris Back office
- Events, promotions
- Order Management System – Search, Navigate, Product selection, Wish list, Discounts, Ratings, Cart, Checkouts
- Payments
- Returns
- Refunds
- Promotions
- Coupons
- Vouchers
- Reorder
- Stock Management System
- Delivery Models – Click & Collect, Home Delivery, Essential Delivery
Types of Software Tests conducted
- Functional Testing
- Mobile Testing
- Regression Testing
- Cross browser testing,
- Usability Testing,
- Integration Testing
- Localization Testing
- Exploratory Testing
- Non-Functional Testing – Load Testing, Stress Testing, Memory leak testing, Battery Analysis
- Browsers Tested: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge
Long-term and short-term cost and quality benefits to the client
- Improved and instituted specialized testing practices with streamlined testing process, best practices and reusable test assets.
- Executed the project well in time in-spite of facing ambiguities in the requirements and achieved 100% adherence to aggressive schedules.
- Proactive testing experiments resulted in enhanced application quality.
- Sixty percent reduction in defect leakage into production due to renewed end-to-end testing of all workflows.
- Increased consumer base through improved application usability.
- Increased product efficiencies through timely defect resolutions resulting in minimum production support calls & issues
- Comprehensive reporting on application performance, system functionality, stability and scalability enabled management to prioritize feature development and benchmark application standards.
- The retail client was able to implement omni-channel integrations and deliver a combination of online and offline shopping experiences.
Write to [email protected] for retail applications testing and data migration projects.