Willy's Cave - TFS Integration Tools (Platform) … The world of TFS Project Template migrations - Part 1
“In Query => Is the migration from one process template to another a plausible scenario? we queried whether there is a need to perform Team Foundation Server (TFS) to TFS migrations … the response was an overwhelming yes. What we were also told is that there is a need to migrate TFS Process Templates, especially with the release of Visual Studio 2010 and the associated need to upgrade. An in-place-upgrade is the recommended upgrade path, however, many users are falling through to the TFS Integration Tools (Platform) and are therefore asking for the relevant configuration files.
Changing process templates is not an easy task, whereby you typically need to sit down, open a XML editor (or notepad) and work out a detailed expression of the mapping in XML. If we ponder over the TFS Integration Tools (Platform) configuration manual we notice a wealth of features we can use, such as:
- FieldMap which defines the field mappings from source to target.
- ValueMap which defines value mappings that can be used in field mapping.
- Conditional Fields which is used to map fields conditionally.
- Field Aggregation which defines a combination of more than one field from the source in one target field
…
Please meet Richard Banks (Visual Studio ALM MVP), who has created a set of configuration files and is happy to share them with the community.
Once again, THANK YOU Richard!His hope is that the community will take them, improve them and re-share … in short, they need a few hugs. Find out more about Richard, who lives in Sydney Australia, here http://www.richard-banks.org/p/about-richard.html.
The configuration files we will be sharing as part of this blog thread include:
- MSF Agile v4 to v5.xml
- MSF v4 to Emc Scrum v3.xml
- Scrum v2 to Agile v5.xml
- scrum v2 to v3.xml
… we will cover them in the listed order. See you in part 2.
…”
Perfect. We’re in the process of getting out TFS2010 system and we’ll be moving from EMC Scrum v2 to Agile v3. We’re likely going go the route of the backing up the TFS2008 Server, restoring to TFS2010 box, doing an in-place upgrade to TFS2010, then an in-place Project Template change (all so our work item numbers don’t change), but I’ll still be following this series to see if there’s a better, easier, less moving-parts approach.
Hi! You noted you were going to do an " in-place Project Template change". I'm wondering if you might explain what that entails?
ReplyDeleteWe are doing something similar... We have a crazily customized version of the CMMI template that came with 2008 and are hoping to migrate projects into the 2010 agile templates - to get something more vanilla. When ever I had examined upgrading the templates in place, it came with unwanted results (left over fields, old template names, etc).
I'm wondering if there were options that I haven't seen...
Thanks much! Jennifer:)
The in-place, as I understand it, is replacing all the XML and stuff from one template with the new one. My take on it is that it's the ugly/unwanted/left over crud approach you mention.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason I like is is that the Work Item numbers remain unchanged.
But if that's not important or a non-issue, then you might look at the migration approach using the TFS Migration toolkit/platform. This is a new platform supported/endorsed by Microsoft for copying TFS stuff from one server to another (like 2008 to 2010) and from one Template to another.
So from highly mod'ed template to a fresh, clean more generic template... ;)
Check out the project at http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com/
Hope this helps,
Greg