Migrating Platforms – A Katalon Success Story
Several months ago, we began mapping out a migration strategy to move from one service platform to another. It would include new databases, new security authentication, a complete data load and new import and export functionality. Basically, new everything.
Since it’s a new platform, it needed a full regression test. It could be done by hand, but that would be slow and issues could easily fall through the cracks. The goal was to introduce automation, so back in December we started with Katalon as our tool of choice to handle the work.
And so we set off to automate as much as possible. It started as a brute force endeavor. Just to get started, tests were created to read data so we could compare Before and After results to confirm we didn’t lose anything. With those complete, it became possible to fill in forms. After a bit more experience and knowledge, we could count items on the page and validate their content. It was then possible to sum columns and confirm internal calculations to site values. Each test built on the last.
The tests continued to expand in depth and complexity until there was a solid set of tests that validated hundreds of data points. A full run could be completed in less than 10 minutes. Doing that same list of tests manually takes an hour to complete. Plus, the tests could be run in the background giving time back for other tasks.
As we practiced the migration, the scripts were quick to uncover issues. They even revealed a few of bugs due to how frequently they were running. After a week of repeated test runs, the environment was stable and we were quite confident to move the process to Staging.
To confirm it’s readiness, the same set of tests were run repeatedly and the small hiccups were ironed out before turning it over to the customer. What they saw was a nearly flawless upgrade experience.
Over the weekend, we did the real upgrade, with the final validation performed by Katalon and the automation scripts. In a fraction of the time, we were able to check dozens of links, read hundreds of sales figures, fill in multiple user forms, confirm each page loaded as expected and compared dozens of known data elements. We also had written confirmation of what we tested so everyone could agree on the sign-off.
I would say that our implementation of Katalon has been a big success. There is still a lot more to learn and more robust tests to write. But, as of now, we have a solid test suite that definitely validates whether the site is working or not.
