In an era of digital transformation, cloud migration plays a crucial role for many businesses for multiple reasons – lesser infrastructure cost, increased security, maintenance, so on and so forth. However, despite the benefits businesses usually allay the fears of end-user experience; wondering if non-functional issues will lead to poor or negative user-experience and ultimately reduce customer satisfaction.
In this background, it is only natural that QA or cloud migration consultants are subjected to help implementation teams to adhere to strict performance SLAs & KPIs. Determining a successful outcome is crucial and necessary. Here are a few factors that would assist in a successful cloud migration.
The first key to success is to have an absolute buy-in of the key project sponsor and create a sense of urgency and vision to achieve operational success. Forming a core group that would stick together and have a shared vision/ goal would be of great help in improving the outcome.
To achieve a successful cloud migration, the QA team must embark on a journey that begins with a deep understanding of the business, the purpose of having built such systems and the real-life challenges they solve, as well as the desires and expectations of the client. Without grasping this fundamental concept which holds the second key to success, clients will miss out on a truly “wow” experience. Therefore, it is crucial that someone with experience (a veteran, perhaps), plays the role of a performance consultant to understand the nitty-gritties of the complexity of cloud migration.
Business stakeholders communicate their non-functional requirements at a high-level, purely in the form of operational characteristics – target user group expectations, time-to-market, regulatory compliance etc. The technical teams/ software architect further translates these non-functional aspects of operational characteristics into performance, responsiveness, availability, and scalability to name a few. The third key to success lies here, to understand the operational characteristics spelled out by the business and structural integrity requirements called out by the software architects.
It is essential to map these two forms of requirements and unearthing any missed requirements. One of the best ways to have this covered from all angles is to have a non-functional requirements document that would help gather these as well as unearth some of the unknown requirements. It is important the key project sponsor creates the urgency and communicates the vision to everyone involved in the project.
Please take note that when templates are sent, they usually do not get the desired information from stakeholders due to various reasons like conflicting priorities, or due to the unavailability of key personnel to provide the information. One of the ways to make this work, is to send out the templates with pre-read materials a couple of days prior to the meeting along with the expectations from the audience. Once this is done, it makes it easier to capture the information. These templates would cover requirements from – performance, responsiveness, availability, scalability, elasticity, data integrity, fault tolerance, data consistency, recoverability, security, concurrency, and reliability.
The basis of any successful testing is requirements gathering. If one were to approach this step in a multi-pronged approach the outcome is bound to be successful since all the stakeholders’ expectations are addressed.
