Standards = Starting Point

 Post written by Wade W., BI Consultant at Ideaca. Read more about BI on his blog: Pragmatic Business Intelligence.  

In a data migration project, standards are synonymous with quality.

Every developer has a different philosophy of what works. Many say that it is easier to develop with “what I know," which sounds a lot like “quick and dirty."

The definition of, or existence of Standards of Development and Naming Conventions provide guidelines within which developers should be expected to work. Without these, your environment quickly becomes rife with development packages, interfaces and jobs with different naming conventions, different approaches and widely varying levels of development quality.

I think it is common that, lacking a mentor or some kind of guidance, developers new to data migration start the same way – monster jobs, lack of flexibility, lack of clarity…and lack of documentation. Result: effectively, unmaintainable, throw-away jobs.

The good news is, as discussed, there is a remedy: Take the time to define standards, or work with a supplier who uses a proven methodology based on established standards and quality-centric processes…ideally processes that can be templated and reused.

Re-usability of processes (i.e. “templates") should be your objective. Ensure that in your environment, your team lead is responsible to establish a set of skeleton templates (say 5-10?) that 95% of all your data migration mappings can be based on. “Skeleton” templates means that they are pre-populated with the parameters (that’s “placeholders” for the project-specific values) – these skeleton templates contain no table structure information – just as much development that can be reused in all cases.

Once you have this in place, you can quantifiably calculate substantial cost savings just from having these templates in place… from every project.

Really.