In many data migration projects the design and development stage can rely heavily on a review of source documentation. This can represent one of the significant risk areas due to the possibility that these materials are absent, out of date or wrong. The approach used by Arbutus Migrate is data driven, using the real source data. This approach has some important advantages:
- uses real data early in the process, revealing issues that need to be addressed up front
- estimates the scope of the project more accurately
- minimizes your reliance on reviews of potentially inaccurate source documentation
- ensures important business and technical issues are not overlooked
- allows you to derive most of your meta data directly from the source data
- supports agile methodologies and an iterative approach to migrating data with a continuous tuning until all issues are thoroughly addressed
- increases reliability of tests more than if the process was undertaken using test data
- allows to quantify and identify data quality issues at the outset