Design Notes Applications with Data Integrity in Mind
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Changes to an application design can cause many data integrity issues. For example, changes that resulted in a field being renamed can cause data to disappear, at least from a user’s perspective, and are virtually impossible to find unless you know they are missing. Similarly, orphaned documents are just as difficult to deal with. If you have a large database, it may be impractical to check each document manually, prior to deployment. As a result, these issues don’t even present themselves until they are in the production environment.
Data maintenance should be a primary concern when designing strategies. Make sure that application managers are involved in deployment plans and possibly even design plans. There should be functionality built into the application that can monitor data integrity issues. Relatively simple scheduled agents can be developed that can periodically check documents, or update older documents to conform to new designs.
Feedback for any potential usability issue causing data to be input incorrectly should be provided immediately. An easy way to prevent issues is to make it extremely clear what data is required for each field, and in what format it should be. Make sure your design requirements entail the use of input validation and input translation formulas. Not letting data errors be input in the first place is critical.