Signs it is time to revisit data migration
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A few signals that data migration is due some attention.
Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The signals
- Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
- The answer depends on who you ask
- Migrations fail on the data nobody knew existed
- Run it against a full copy before the real thing
How we handle it
Always have a documented way back. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The short version
Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Three things worth confirming about data migration before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Migrations fail on the data nobody knew existed — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.