After completing the assessment step, you should have some understanding of the effort that will be required to complete the port. At this point, using your knowledge of DB2 and information from the DB2 Porting Guides, as well as the IBM Migration Toolkit (MTK), try to convert a representative subset of the application to DB2 and analyze any issues that arise. You should not attempt to resolve performance issues at this stage; the sole purpose of this activity is to get a representative subset of the application fully functioning with DB2. This activity is very important, as it enables you to confirm, revise any time and complexity estimates that you may have formulated earlier, or both. It also allows you to determine which database objects and features can be converted automatically for you and those that will require manual conversion effort. It might also expose other issues that were not previously anticipated and allow you to develop strategies for converting them.
Without a plan, it is very easy to miss a few key tasks that will become unwelcome "surprises" later on (and cause slippage in the overall plan). So it is a good idea to create a detailed project plan from which you and the rest of the porting team can work.
Each project is different, but there are some factors that can help you estimate the overall effort. For example, for applications that frequently use stored procedures, the number and complexity of the stored procedures to be converted will greatly affect the length of the conversion. The same applies to the use of special data types, proprietary functionality being used, or both.
Determine which tasks can be performed in parallel
Assign resource roles to each task
Determine and adjust for predecessor/prerequisite relationships among the tasks
Assign individual(s) to each role
A porting plan can be as simple as a spreadsheet that lists the main tasks of the port and some of the associated information for each task (start date, end date, elapsed time, dependencies, who is assigned, and so on). There are also project planning tools that can create project plans and track the project. These tools let you assign tasks to specific people (or roles), establish dependencies among the various steps of the port (for example, you can't really begin functional testing until you move the database structure and the test data), and chart the original plan against what actually happens.
To help in the planning process, a porting and migration planning white paper is available that covers the various porting steps, and contains a sample template that can be used to plan a port and migration. By following the steps and suggestions in this paper, you should be able to develop an accurate and detailed project plan.
