System migration may be the most dangerous thing you ever do

Pity the poor IT department that is about to migrate a key application from one platform to another. Or perform a major upgrade. Or worse, merge into another company's systems after being acquired. It's a recipe for disaster.

Consider the plight of Mailbank.com, the Boulder, Colo.-based provider of e-mail and Web services under the name NetIdentity. Acquired recently by Toronto-based Tucows, the companies are moving, migrating, and otherwise homogenizing millions of e-mail accounts, including one of mine.

It's not going as planned.

NetIdentity had a brilliant business plan. Over the years, it has registered more than 15,000 surname-based domains. If you want an e-mail account with your last name as the domain, chances are pretty good you have to go through them. My personal e-mail account is through NetIdentity and has worked trouble-free for years.

In June, Tucows acquired NetIdentity. I'm still getting my mail, using Microsoft Outlook as a POP3 client. The only time I ever log into my e-mail account directly through a browser is when I'm traveling. I don't use the bundled address book, message archiving, and online calendar services. Apparently, that's a good thing.

Based on messages being sent out from Tucows, the migration process has hit several speedbumps.

Here's a message from Sept. 26 posted on the NetIdentity Web site. "Missing Contact Data: You may notice during the migration that your contact data appears to have gone missing. This is not the case. Contact data migration is part of a separate process. This process is taking longer than expected and as a result, giving our subscribers the appearance that the data has gone missing. This is not the case and your contact data will automatically show up as quickly as we can fix the backlog. We will post more information concerning when all contact data has been migrated. Thank you for your patience."

Today, Sept. 27, Tucows sent out an e-mail blast with additional details and identifying more woes. " Missing Folders: During the migration, the system also turned some of your folders 'off.' Your folders still exist -- you just can't see them." The message goes on to explain how to log in and restore folder visibility.

And here's another from the same e-mail blast. "Can't Customize Your Name in your 'FROM' Address: The system has changed the display of your name to only be that of your email address, where you had your name beside your email address before. . . Unfortunately, the 'FROM' line cannot currently be changed. However, we realize the way you display your name is important and our technical team is working on fixing this issue as soon as possible.

You get the point. Such mishaps occur all the time, and I cite NetIdentity only because it's fresh in my mind. Nevertheless, these failings cannot be ascribed to the ethereal "computer glitch." As IT professionals, we know there is no such thing. Programs always perform precisely in accordance with the lines of code written by a programmer. If a decimal point is misplaced and customers are charged $10 when it should be $100, it's not the computer's fault. Those customers are not likely to complain, either.

When performing major system upgrades or changes of any kind, testing and quality assurance remain essential. Years ago, when working as a systems analyst for a large bank, we spent nearly as much time testing as we did developing. Even for the smallest of changes, say, adding a second space between the state and ZIP code on millions of printed monthly statements, we developed test scripts and scenarios that could run dozens of pages. For more substantial changes, such as introducing a new transaction at the automated teller machine, the test scripts could easily top a hundred pages. Analysts and programmers had meetings to dream up the wildest of scenarios.

Since this was a large institution, we had the luxury of parallel systems, one for production, the other strictly for development and testing. Unfortunately, that's not always possible.

With the demise of the mainframe and migration to modern rack-mounted servers, the art of quality assurance has lost much of cachet. That's too bad, especially when we realize that computers are far more essential to everything we do than were the mainframes of yesteryear.

As integrators developing applications for clients or merely advising clients as they do their own development, the importance of creating test scenarios --- no matter how silly they might seem --- and development of scripts that detail each scenario and its expected outcome is of critical importance.