EXPERT RESPONSE
It looks like you have identified the important components of your migration. With respect to minimizing downtime during the migration, you may be able to achieve zero downtime depending on the tool(s) you choose. Whatever method/tool you choose, be sure to create a test environment as an exact duplicate of your production environment. This way you can practice your migration multiple times until it is perfected.
With respect to code migration and quickly identifying modifications, the best way to do this is test, test and test. While it's important to test your migration procedures, it is equally important to involve your application support teams and business users at the start so that functional testing of applications can take place. Encourage your application support teams and business users to develop test plans and use them every time you test the database migration procedure. Even after performing exhaustive testing in your non-production environment, it is still possible (often likely) that new problems may arise once the migration occurs in production.
Finally, with respect to your question about load testing, I have heard of a product that works with Oracle9i and 10g. It's called Swingbench and it can be downloaded here. According to information on the Web site, "Swingbench is a free load generator (and benchmarks) designed to stress test an Oracle database (9i or 10g)." I have not personally used the product but I have heard good things about it from others.
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