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May 29, 2008
Standards = Starting Point
In a data migration project, Standards are synonymous with Quality.
Every developer has a different philosophy of what works. It is easier to develop with "what I know"...which rhymes with "quick and dirty"...
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.
I have seen the above at most of my clients over the last 10 years...and I was one of those unfortunate newbies...10 years ago...new to the technology, yet sold by my employer as an expert after only a 3-day training. Sound familiar? The unfortunate truth, is this probably does happen to you.
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 re-used.
Re-usability of processes (i.e. "templates) should be your objective - Ensure 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 re-used 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.
Wade Walker
Methodata
WEBSITE : www.methodata.com
Posted by Wade Walker at May 29, 2008 9:33 AM
