WFM QuickRefresh

The Issue

It’s a problem that every technical manager faces after go-live: how can you make sure your production environment matches your test environments so that features and fixes for the next release can be tested in the proper context? What about the test data the team spent so long building for the last release? How much time and hardware are needed to create and deploy copies of the production database?

Often the answers are not simple, the solutions can keep your test environments down and your top technical talent busy for weeks after each release, and your regression test data gets wiped out in the process. That’s why Sability has created a better, easier way: WFM QuickRefresh.

The Cost of Manual Backfills

Sability has nearly 100 years of combined WFM experience on staff - more than enough to recognize patterns in how WFM customers handle production deployments and the backfill process. We have learned how to recognize and control the costs, risks, and challenges inherent to this task.

Hardware

Production databases hold many gigabytes of data, most of it timesheets, schedules and other transactional data. A typical large project could have 6 or more WFM development and test instances. Finding room for that many copies of every timesheet and schedule on hardware sized for development purposes is not easy, practical, or costeffective.

Downtime

Customers who do decide to copy their entire production database to their test environments are faced with three major challenges, besides finding enough hardware to handle it: It takes a long time to extract the data from production. It takes a long time to copy and load the data into the test environment, during which time the environment is unavailable for use by the project team. Because the data was extracted from a live production database over a period of many hours, the resulting dumpfile is sure to contain referential integrity problems that will need to be manually resolved by a WFM expert before the environment can be brought back online

Human Error

Applying configuration changes manually to test environments instead of copying the entire production database poses a challenge: with typical data entry error rates around 3-5% for the simplest of tasks, how can you guarantee that the complex configurations applied manually to a test environment are equivalent to production?
Every error poses an increased risk of future production defects, especially regressions. This isn’t just theory; it happens all the time, and it is an unavoidable consequence of using a fully manual approach.

Manpower

Making copies of the production database requires you to engage your DBA, one or more systems analysts, a WFM expert, and testers to validate the health of the resulting system. If your production environment is hosted by a third party, there will be additional direct costs to your project. Since the environment’s test data will have been destroyed in the process, your testers will need to recreate their data during the testing phase of the next release. All of this effort adds significantly to the cost of each release.

Impact to Timelines

The typical delay between a major production release and the start of unit testing for the next release is about 4 weeks, due in large part to the time it takes to backfill to a test environment. This has a direct impact on the project timeline. Reducing the time between production deployment and the start of unit testing for the next release is a straightforward way to compress your project’s timelines by 2-3 weeks per release.

Sability WFM QuickRefresh

QuickRefresh is designed to make it faster, easier, and safer to copy your production configurations to test and development environments. By isolating configuration data from transactional data, QuickRefresh allows you to copy a much smaller volume of data between WFM instances without overwriting transactional data. Because QuickRefresh comes preconfigured for all core Workbrain / Infor WFM versions, implementing your new backfill process is straightforward.

It is often useful to copy a manageable subset of “real-world” schedules, employee profiles and timesheets from production to development and test environments to allow testing to be performed against the most realistic dataset possible. QuickRefresh can be combined with Sability WFM TimeCapture to also copy transactional data, with masking to protect sensitive employee information, as part of your production backfill.

Please contact sales@sability.com to arrange a demo or to obtain pricing and licensing information.