In the modern, fast-paced digitization era, more and more organizations are converting their IT products to the cloud. This is due to the diverse advantages it provides for businesses. For context, a professionally performed migration can significantly optimize budgets by eliminating the need to upgrade and maintain hardware. It allows for more efficient storage of sensitive data protected by built-in recovery mechanisms, enhances collaboration by enabling team members to access data from any device anywhere, and provides round-the-clock analytics for streamlined decision-making. Given these benefits, it’s no surprise that within just one year, IT spending on public cloud services is expected to surpass spending on conventional IT.
Unfortunately, migration paths aren’t that easy to navigate and involve diverse complications, specifically related to **software based on legacy code, **the upgrade of IT products, and multiple software dependencies. With professional quality assurance delivered from the early stages, it may be easier for enterprises to ensure successful migration without data loss or corruption, enable high software performance in the cloud environment, avoid team overload, and prevent any interruptions to crucial business processes.
In this article, I’ll focus on the benefits of cloud migration testing, its vital activities, and valuable tips for its effective execution.
Why QA plays a crucial role in cloud migration process
Despite the widespread nature of cloud migration, C-level executives globally still confront problems that lead to the complete failure or deceleration of half of all such projects. These issues arise from multiple factors, including data security and compliance risks, inadequate planning, the need for comprehensive skill-building across the organization, budget constraints, resistance to change among team members, and challenges in ensuring business continuity.
That is why the contribution of QA in supporting the migration workflows is so significant. When performed from the onset of a transition and supplemented with test automation, QA activities can bring the following benefits:
- Boosted confidence. Thorough planning and quality control help detect and rectify software glitches early in the process, thus decreasing the probability of any disruptions or negative influence on business workflows.
- Increased effectiveness. When issues of varying severity levels are identified before escalating into full-scale problems, their resolution becomes much faster and cheaper. This proactive approach reduces the number of regression issues, simplifies problem-solving, optimizes resources, and helps meet deadlines.
- Mitigated performance risks. With proper testing and identification of issues that have potential to exacerbate in the future, QA engineers confirm that migrated IT products have preserved the same performance rates and deliver a similarly positive user experience regardless of the load.
- Improved optimization capabilities. Meticulous testing provides valuable feedback that can be used to unlock the full potential of the cloud environment and ensure adherence to business objectives.
4 essential phases of cloud migration testing to bear in mind
When working on a migration project, I suggest that QA teams split their testing efforts into 4 distinct phases:
1. Get ready
Before the transition itself, it’s vital that QA engineers perform crucial initial activities to confirm that all the information and the application can be seamlessly moved to a new environment. Therefore, it’s a good idea to:
- Think about the overall migration pattern (e.g. re-platform, re-factor, re-host), the choice of the platform (e.g. Oracle, IBM Cloud, Salesforce), and service model (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) to adjust your testing strategy accordingly.
- Consider all functional and non-functional software requirements to enable extensive test coverage and make sure that your test cases include possible risks.
- The migration process can be long, especially if the application has complex business logic, multiple intricate functionalities, and gigabytes of data to move. To accelerate the transition and boost testing precision, QA teams should make use of automated scripts.
- Pay specific attention to software performance in advance to make sure that after the transition no deteriorations have occurred.
- Proactively analyze your software data to make certain it has no issues, discrepancies, or redundancies to enable as accurate migration as possible.
2. Supervise the transition
When migration has started, it’s important that QA engineers are always on alert to swiftly identify and fix arising problems. They should also focus on confirming that moved data is identical to that from the source system and occupies the same position, *no inconsistencies, duplications, or missed data have occurred. *
3. Provide subsequent QA support
After the transition is over, QA specialists should execute diverse tests to ensure failsafe software operation and confirm that no setbacks have appeared. I think the most crucial verifications are:
Functional testing
QA specialists check that all business functionalities don’t deviate from requirements and work exactly as they did in the on-premises environment, meeting user expectations. By running end-to-end scenarios of the required functional testing types, QA teams identify and rectify any errors, verify that all the information has been completely moved and is accurate, complete, and consistent, the application can seamlessly handle errors, and more.
Performance testing
Regardless of the industry, any software application must be able to cope with a high influx of end users, remain operable in the long run, and be effectively scaled as the business grows. Otherwise, the target audience may confront slow operation, freezes, and even crashes.
Therefore, QA specialists conduct server-side performance testing and check the RT for critical business transactions, gauge performance of API calls and database queries, verify software ability to withstand high loads, monitor CPU utilization, memory usage, network latency, and other aspects to ascertain that after migration software performance remains on the same high level.
Cybersecurity testing
Another important aspect to consider is software security, as the application must remain resistant to fraudulent attacks or sensitive data theft and stay compliant with a range of significant industry-specific regulations.
Thus, QA specialists perform cybersecurity verifications, including penetration testing and vulnerability analysis, and check data, infrastructure, and application security (e.g. data encryption, access controls, authentication and authorization) to detect post-migration security breaches and confirm the software is fully protected.
Integration testing
Regardless of the type of software architecture, ensuring the correct functioning of its multiple modules and interactions with external systems (e.g., payment gateways, CRM, ERP) is essential. Therefore, testing experts conduct integration verifications after moving to the cloud to check data flow between various components and other IT solutions, verify API integrations, assess how the UI communicates with the back-end, and more.
Compatibility testing
Successful cloud migration is nearly impossible without compatibility testing, during which QA specialists confirm that migrated systems work correctly across various browsers, devices, and platforms, regardless of their screen sizes, resolutions, or hardware configurations.
Usability testing
It’s difficult to provide smooth and intuitive digital experience without focusing on usability verifications. During testing, QA engineers should make sure that the overall layout and design remain as aesthetically pleasing as they were before the transition, navigation is simple, and users can easily reach their objectives with migrated software as before.
As I’ve already mentioned, migration to the cloud is a highly complex process that can’t be performed overnight. Therefore, I’d recommend QA teams to implement automated workflows. With their help, it’s possible to successfully handle a wide range of time-consuming, repetitive testing activities (e.g. regression, performance, security), speed up QA cycles, minimize risks of human mistakes, and simplify the process of verifying software operation after transition to the cloud.
4. Ensure continuous software efficiency in the new environment
You’ve successfully migrated the entire IT product to the cloud, congrats! However, the work is not finished yet. Establishing a comprehensive monitoring and optimization plan is one more essential component of the process. It provides your QA teams with valuable insights into crucial performance metrics (RT, CPU, memory, network, error rates), overall software health, and probable security vulnerabilities. In addition, with real-time analytics QA engineers can identify areas for improved resource utilization leading to probable cost reduction.
Tried-and-true hacks to simplify QA during transition
To increase the effectiveness of cloud migration testing, I suggest that companies consider some useful tips, namely:
- Set up a QA environment that closely mirrors your cloud environment to ensure real-life testing conditions and identify as many defects as possible.
- Create a detailed roadmap with objectives, responsibilities, deadlines, and KPIs to make sure everyone is abreast of significant milestones.
- Establish effective communication processes so that all involved team members can have clear interaction channels and quickly receive data on any updates or changes.
- Don’t forget documentation and reporting to provide extensive test coverage, ensure effective defect management, enable informed decision-making, and support knowledge transfer for new team members.
- If organizations feel that they lack solid QA processes and specific knowledge related to cloud migration testing or have problems with in-house team performance, they can engage QA consultants who can support with improving testing workflows and mitigating arising issues.
Conclusion
Transitioning digital solutions to a cloud environment is a rewarding practice that provides business owners with multiple benefits, among which I’d mention better security, agility, interaction, cost-saving, among others.
However, this process isn’t a walk in the park and should be supported by meticulous software testing to make sure the entire application is fully migrated without any deteriorations in its operation.
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