Refining and Documenting Your Migration Methodology

A migration project is not the end of the line for your migration methodology. You need to carefully record the lessons you have learned, the tools you have created, and the best practices you have established so that the next migration can be even more successful than this one.

The following list outlines some of the areas for which you should catalog your triumphs and pitfalls for future projects:

• Tools and techniques

• Testing plans and test harnesses

• Porting libraries

• Porting techniques and standards

• Catalog of lessons learned

• Architectural standards

In addition to the preceding topics, you should document the architecture of the migrated software. Remember when you were trying to assess the existing deployment and infrastructure? How much documentation was available? How much would you have liked to have had? Use the migration assessment and the implementation plan to document the following:

• Overall application structure

• Interconnects and dependencies

• Test cases

• Third-party tools

• Management architecture

This documentation should be stored and used in the planning of your next migration project.