Rough order of operations—plan your migration to best effect
From interviews we conducted with people who have done their migration work, we derived this checklist you can follow in planning your own migration:

1. Do your homework. Understand the porting issues.
   • See porting discussions at various levels including the technical articles such as "Porting to the Itanium Architecture" and "What Are the Highest-Priority Apps to Port?". See also our "Resource Guide" for key links to major sources of information about specific operating systems and other issues.
2. Set expectations.
3. Sort out code.
   • Separate your code from third-party code and determine appropriate solutions.
   • Separate code modules for individual work and test individually before assembling.
   • Separate easy from difficult code—start with DLLs and end with executables and services.
4. Assess code. Identify expected problems such as data size assumptions and misalignment.
5. Lay out the process. Document the details of the code (size, language, etc., and work needed).
6. Start cleaning up problems to aid portability. You won't catch everything, but it will help.
7. Investigate tools.
   • Find out which programs for operating systems, databases, etc. are open and which are closed.
   • Check availability of compilers in your languages.
   • If necessary, pound on your suppliers to ship their upgrades.
8. Get tools—compilers, alignment tools, etc.
9. Get started with simple port to get your feet wet. You can compile 64-bit code on a 32-bit machine—then use remote access to a 64-bit machine for debugging.
10. Use alignment tools.
11. Test
    • Do full regression testing to make sure there aren't run-time issues that didn't come out as compiler issues. Debug.
    • Test output against known results.
    • Make sure port is solid.
12. Identify and fix runtime specific issues.
13. Test again.
    • Make sure port is very solid.
14. Optimize.
    • Try compiler run-time optimization.
    • Get in and optimize further as necessary
15. Test, test, test!

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© 2005 Intel Corp.