Database Migration Testing for Global Law Firm

Roq supports the migration of c.170m documents to the cloud, reducing project times from 5 years to 200 days for a leading law firm’s business-critical Database Migration Service programme.

The Client 

Our Client is a multinational law firm. It is a member of the "Magic Circle" of elite London-headquartered law firms. It currently employs over 2,800 lawyers with offices in 20 countries.

Roq has been providing its client with expert testing services as part of a managed test service agreement since 2018.  During this period Roq has delivered more than a dozen projects, including but not limited to Azure DevOps implementation and iOS mobile device testing, CI/CD pipeline introduction, and Windows 10 updates-testing. These successful projects have resulted in significant benefits for its client including cost reductions, resource efficiencies and the quality of tests.

The latest of these projects was to support the migration of around 170 million documents from an on-premises location to a secure, cloud solution.  The existing solution was rapidly approaching its end-of-life, and our client faced the prospect of a complex and costly upgrade to make it fit for purpose.

A process had been established to carry out the migration, which involved meta-data extraction, transformation, and finally, upload of the file with the associated meta-data to the new cloud-based DMS.  However, as a critical project for the client, it was essential that their documents would not be corrupted in the process and that meta-data would not be lost or incorrectly transformed in the transition to the new environment. Taking into account the sensitivity of the data, it was also crucial that permissions models were correctly migrated and applied to keep the documents and data secure.  A robust testing solution was needed to enable the success of the project, and the client approached Roq to design a test solution that covered each phase of the migration.

Roq’s Solution

Roq reviewed each step of the Client’s process to identify any potential points of corruption and failure, enabling us to overlay content migration scripts onto their process so that these scripts could be run against all of their documents for each stage.

This approach entailed initially identifying which documents should be migrated. The source database was then queried to retrieve the meta-data, and relevant transformation rules were applied before being compared to the actual extracted data. The solution then took the extracted data, applied further transformation rules, and validated that the pre-upload data was in the correct form. It then retrieved the uploaded data from the cloud-based solution to validate that it was correct.

Adopting this approach facilitates the identification of data errors at each stage of migration so that the resolution of issues is significantly easier and quicker.

The final stage of testing in this process is to query the source solution, identify the physical location of the original document and generate a unique hash identifier for it, with this file becoming the “expected”. The migrated content file is then retrieved from the destination system, and the same process is performed on it to generate a unique hash identifier, the “actual”. The expected and actual values are then compared to verify that the file has not been changed or corrupted.

All test findings are stored in a results database, and as the project evolved the reporting requirements also evolved. This will result in the production of a database that is likely to reach 20 billion rows of data.  This will provide our client with an audit trail and the ability to refer to all passed and failed migrations. The scope of the migration project grew from its original conception – from originally addressing the validation of documents, to later also include the validation of folders, workspaces, document security permissions, users, and groups.

The Outcome  

Our programme team is delighted with the outcome of this project.  The early results mean that many more documents than anticipated can be tested prior to our go-live date and the rest can be retrospectively reconciled.

Client Technology Software Development & Testing Manager

From their own calculations, the Client had identified that it would take up to 5 years to test every single document.  However, due to the way Roq has scripted the automation, and the implementation of parallel execution, the project timeline was reduced to c.200 days.

• Reduction of project timeline from 5 years to c.200 days

• Testing for c.170m document uploads; and

• Creation of 20bn data rows for audit and analysis

If you’d like to find out more about how Roq can support your business, please email us at ask@roq.co.uk.