Have you survived a migration?

Questions
1

I am creating migration assurance software and I am looking for individuals who have survived a migration and can answer a few questions. It should only take about 10 or 15 mins of your time.

Anyone out there care to help out?

The questions are pretty simple.

Is migration painful?

Is verification manual?

Who pays, if anyone?

Would a pre-migration assessment be valuable?

What would make it trustworthy?

What would make you, or your clients, consider moving automations from one platform to another?

If you had to migrate workflows today, how would you do it?

Which workflows would you be most nervous about moving?

After a workflow is rebuilt, how do you know it still does what it originally did?

What parts of a workflow migration are most likely to break or need manual review?

Before paying for a migration, would it be useful to get a report showing which workflows look straightforward, which need adaptation, which are blocked, and which need human review?

Who would decide, generally, to make that move?

If the report helped avoid a failed migration, or bad quote, what do you think would feel like a reasonable price range for it?

I appreciate anyone who takes the time to answer even some of these questions. Thank you.

2

Migration can definitely be painful when the workflows have multiple integrations and custom logic.

From an automation perspective, I think the biggest risks are usually not the simple actions themselves, but the dependencies around them: authentication, webhooks, API limits, data mapping, filters/routers, error handling, and custom logic.

A pre-migration assessment would be valuable if it could identify these dependencies before the workflow is rebuilt. I’d especially want to see workflows categorized as:

  • straightforward to migrate

  • requires adaptation

  • blocked by platform differences

  • requires manual review/testing

For verification, I wouldn’t rely only on whether the new workflow runs successfully. I’d compare important outputs between the old and new workflows using representative test data and verify that the same business outcome is produced.

The workflows I’d be most nervous about migrating are the ones with multiple APIs, custom HTTP requests, webhooks, complex branching, and third-party authentication.

A migration report showing these risks before someone commits to the migration could be very useful, especially if it helps estimate the actual effort rather than treating every workflow as equally difficult.

3

Wow, thank you so much, Temi! This is great information. And I especially like the bullet points you have there.

I spoke with an agency the other day, they have about 26 specialists and they most focus on small service businesses. They said about the same as you.

They used an analogy I liked. ”It’s like a plumber moving a piping system from one house to the next, things are not just going to line up the same even if the layout is the same."

They also told me that some nodes just don’t exist from one platform to the next and they have to rebuild it using either code or different kinds of nodes.