During a migration project, the issues that your team will face may tend to become repetitive. Because of this, it is important that you have mechanisms that allow team members to share the knowledge that they have earned in the process of migrating the application. This way, you are not likely to have a team member struggling to fix a migration issue that someone else in the team already knows how to solve.
An ideal way of sharing team knowledge during the migration process is the creation of a Project Knowledge Base, where team members can post the solutions that they have applied to previous migration issues. With a good knowledge base, developers will be able to make searches and retrieve information that will help them fix the issues that they are facing, possibly increasing team productivity and reducing costs.
To be effective, your project knowledge base needs to have the following characteristics:
- Easy access: team members should easily retrieve information as well as add new items to the knowledge base.
- Search capability: of course, you don’t want team members navigating the knowledge base for hours to find a solution to a problem.
- Periodic backup: place the knowledge base on a server that is being backed up regularly. In a later project, the information stored may be useful again.
It is common to implement these knowledge bases using a Wiki engine. More information on Wiki can be obtained at http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki.
Also, some examples of popular wiki sites are Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) and Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Portal:Main), this last one is a personal favorite :)