Azure DevOps Server - How to migrate existing collection/project to SCRUM - tfs

We did upgrade TFS 2013 Update 2 to Azure DevOps Server (on-premises), we don't know exactly which Template all of our collections use but we would like to convert it to SCRUM.
Is it possible to convert our existing projects/collections to this template?

Is it possible to convert our existing projects/collections to this template?
I am afraid it is impossible to achieve that.
According to official documentation, we could to know:
You can change the process a team project uses from a system process
or inherited process to an inherited process. You can only change team
projects to use another process that inherits from the same system
process. That is, you can change an Agile-based team project to any
process you created from the Agile system process as well as to the
Agile process. Whereas, you can't change a Scrum-based team project to
an Agile-derived inherited process.
So, it is not possible to convert process templates for your existing projects/collections in Azure DevOps Server.
You could create a new projects/collections based on SCRUM and then move your source code and workitems to that new projects/collections. For source control you could always branch out from a stable version, and keep the old project around. That way you will keep you source history. For work items, you can export them to Excel, create a new Excel connection to Azure DevOps Server, that is connected to the new team project, and then copy the workitems and pushing them from the new Excel file into the new project.
BTW, you can learn to use witadmin to change things, but that isn't a best practice if you have workitems in the team projects:
Check this thread for some details.
Hope this helps.

Related

Azure Boards process type after migration from TFS 2010 to DevOps Server 2020 on-premises

We have migrated a TFS 2010 server with a couple of project collections to Azure DevOps 2020 on-premises. All migrated data looks fine, but in the mirgrated projects, it is not possible to create an inherited process (the context menu of a process only provides "New team project" and "Export". Whereas in newly created process collections it is possible (the contex menu provides "New team project", "Create inherited process", and others. Our first idea was, that the migrated collections use the XML process type, but also we found no way to convert this or change to the inherited process type.
Is there a way to use inherited process in our migrated process collections?
Is there a way to use inherited process in our migrated process collections?
I am afraid that there is no such method to migrate the XML process to inherited process.
If you want to use inherited process, you need to create a new Collection with inherited process in Azure DevOps Server 2022.
This feature exists in Azure Devops Service. You could refer to this doc: Clone a Hosted XML process to an Inheritance process.
According to the doc, this feature only exists in the Azure Devops Service. When you select azure devops server 2022 in the drop-down box in the upper left corner, you can directly see that it is not supported.
Here is a suggestion ticket about this feature. Our product group has decided not to implement this feature on azure devops server.
For those customers who wish to go to Inherited, you have the
following choices.
Move to the Azure DevOps Service
Create a new inherited collection and continue your project work
within that collection

TFS 2017 move TFS source code repository to new instance of TFS

We installed the free version of TFS 2017 and created a new project. We now have source code with history. The PM decided they wanted to switch from Agile to Scrum so a lot of commands were run to try to do this. These commands came from a blog found on the internet. The supervisor then decided that it should NOT have been switched to scrum and said we needed to switch back to Agile. So similar commands were run to try to do that. Now the Project Management portion of our project is broken. We can't run queries and the work items are corrupted. I want to try to just install a new instance of free TFS 2017 and copy/move the source code (TFS, NOT GIT) to the new instance and start over with the PM stuff. Can we do this or is it a lost cause.
Actually we do not suggest OPs to do the process template change in a single team project. Take a look at this MS documentation (here) ...
You can change the process a team project uses from a system process
or inherited process to an inherited process. You can only change team
projects to use another process that inherits from the same system
process. That is, you can change an Agile-based team project to any
process you created from the Agile system process as well as to the
Agile process. Whereas, you can't change a Scrum-based team project to
an Agile-derived inherited process.
There is no need to set up a totally new TFS instance, you could simply create a new team project based on Agile and then move your source code and workitems to that new team project.
Since you are not care about the history info about your original team project, it's more easier to achieve this, simply remove your old workspace mapping and map to the new team project.
To move workitems you can export them to Excel, create a new Excel connection to , that is connected to the new team project, and then copy the workitems and pushing them from the new Excel file into the new project.
If you insist on moving the code to new TFS server, you just need to back up your local code and directly check in them as pending changes in the newly created team project on new TFS server.
More details please refer the answer from Andrew Clear in this similar question: Visual Studio Team Services: How to migrate from Agile to Scrum process template
If you want to only move Source code from one Team Project Collection to another Team Project Collection, one of the crude workarounds is the following, when you are ONLY requiring SRC code moves.
Create a workspace and check out all SRC from the source Team Project in the source TPC.
Create a new Team Project in the new TFS instance.
Remove the binding files from the SRC dumped out in (1), or better yet just move it on the disk to a new directory and remove all SRC binding files.
Then add the source (from the above step 3) into the new Team Project you created in the target TPC you created in (2) above (or it could also be into an existing Team Project you already had in the target TPC).
Once again this is ONLY if you don’t care about the other things such as WITs and Reports from the older Team Project, and you only care about the Source Code.
In addition, you can use the following tool Timely Migration.

How to upgrade process template for team project in TFS 2018?

I have been responsible for administrate our TFS projects and have started to investigate the current configurations. I found the following link for determining which process our team projects are connected to: How to determine what Process template an existing TFS 2012 project is configured with?
When using the rest API described in the article above, it seems like the projects depend on a process template called "Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013". When reading this article: Scrum process it seems to me that the process is outdated and should be upgraded to use the "Scrum" template.
I have searched the internet for knowledge on how to upgrade the project to use the new Scrum process but had no luck of finding an answer. Does anyone have an idea of how to update the projects to depend on a newer process? Maybe the whole question is wrongly put as I may lack some obvious knowledge about how these things are meant to work. All I want is to ensure our projects are updated to use the latest TFS technology.
We use Visual Studio 2017 and did recently upgrade our TFS server to TFS 2018.
In general, some new features will be introduced when upgrade from old to new version of TFS.
Generally if you haven't made any changes to the original process template, upgrading is quite easy. Just enable new features by running the Configure Features Wizard in your team projects configuration page.
If it can’t upgrade automatically, you need to apply updates manually. See Add updates to team projects manually.
If you customized the process template, then you can follow the steps mentioned in this link to Update a customized process template to access new features.
To update the existing projects, a not so nice but easy way is to remove all work items and process data from your project and then add the newest items. Martin Hinshelwood has some great guidance on how to do this.

TFS 2010 source control backup/restore

Is there a way to backup just the source control component of a team project and restore it into a different TFS server? We setup a TFS 2010 server for RND, but decided to use it's source control manager for a development project. We did this so the developers can learn how to work with it before we use it on a much bigger project. Now, we need to blow away the server since it is a VM for RND. We're going to setup a new TFS server for production. I don't want to lose the source code history.
Yes, you can use the TFS Integration Tools to migrate source with history for one or more Team Projects to another server. It is very easy to use.
TFS Integration Tools Download
I hope this helps
Mike
Use the features built into the product. In Dev10, collections were added so artifacts (including source) would be portable between TFS servers - leverage that. Pilot projects were a key scenario for portable artifacts and a justification for collections.
Dettach the collection from the VM TFS instance. It's available from the collection node of the admin console.
Backup the database from the database you dettached.
Deploy the new real server (non-VM).
Restore that collection database to the sql server used for the production instance.
Using the administration console collections node, attach the collection to the newly deployed TFS server.
Now you have the source available from the prototype period and you have a new production collection available for the new production instance.
BTW, in Dev 11 (you can get build conference CTP or beta soon) TFS upgrades the collection on attach so if you deploy a Dev11 TFS server, you can attach that prototype collection and pull it forward.

Steps for changing process template for an existing project in TFS 2010

I have an TFS server installation that through time has gone through upgrades from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008 and then to TFS 2010.
During the lifetime of the installation a lot of projects have been created and different project templates have been used. MSF Agile 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 5.0. and a few MSF CMMI ones.
What I would like to do is "replace" the project template used for all these projects to use a new one common one: Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0.
I am aware that TFS project templates are used as templates for creating new projects and cannot modify the tfs projects definitions after creation.
Uptil now only the version control and build server part of TFS have been used and there are no existing work item types.
Additionally all projects and build scripts are depending on the source code paths stay the same.
As I see it I have the following options:
Create new TFS projects using the correct project template and then move/branch the source code to the new project.
All code is moved to a temporary team project.
The old project is deleted
New project with the original name and correct process template is created
Code is moved to the new team project
Temporary team project is deleted
All the build definitions needs to be to recreated which is not an option.
The source code move/branch will "mess up" the versioning history
By messing up the versioning history I mean that when you move source code it will behind the scenes do a delete + source rename on the original location and the history will still be located in the old project. This will make searching in the history difficult and if I actually delete the old project I will loose all the history before the source code move.
This is really not an option for me since there is years of code change history that is needed to for supporting the different applications being built.
Use the TFS migration tools to migrate to another TFS project
This has the same downsides as the first solution
Replace/import work item types, install new reports, create new SharePoint sites
For each tfs project
Delete existing work item definitions using "witadmin deletewitd"
Import each work item definition from the new process template using "witadmin importwitd"
Import work item categories using "witadmin importcategories"
Delete old reports in project folder in report server
Upload the report definitions from the new process template
Modify data sources used for the reports using the report manager to point to the correct shared data sources (TfsReportDS and TfsOlapReportsDS)
Modify the report parameter ExplicitProject default value to "" (empty string) and disable prompt user option.
Export the documents in the old SharePoint site using stsadm
Delete the old SharePoint site
Recreate the sharepoint site using the TFS2010 Agile Dashboard site template
Activate site feature "Team Foundation Server Scrum dashboard"
In TFS Project Settings -> Project Portal Settings: Enable "team project portal" and ensure the url is correct. Enable "reports and dashboards refer to data for this team project"
And finally..
Process the Warehouse
Process the Analysis Database
Even though that this involves a lot of small steps this looks more appealing because
this option will not force me to move the source code and my existing build definitions will be intact.
My question:
Are there other ways to achieve the replacement of work item types that I haven't mentioned?
And/or am I missing any steps in last solution?
Given that you aren't using any existing work item types, your final proposal looks like the best option.
After deleting the old reports and exporting the SharePoint documents (you could also use Windows Explorer instead of stsadm), there are actually two commands in 'tfpt' that will help you. This will reduce it from 14 steps down to 5 or 6 steps.
tfpt addprojectreports Add or overwrite reports for an existing team project
tfpt addprojectportal Add or move portal for an existing team project
tfpt addprojectreports /collection:http://yourtfs:8080/tfs/YourCollection /teamproject:"Your Team Project" /processtemplate:"Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0" /verbose
tfpt addprojectreports /collection:http://yourtfs:8080/tfs/YourCollection /teamproject:"Your Team Project" /processtemplate:"Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0" /verbose
Your first option is IMHO your best shot.
You can branch the sources from the old team project to the new team project. With TFS 2010 you can see the history also from the branched location. So you don't loose functionality in here.
The Build is just an msbuild file which is stored in source control. The only thing you have to do is actually copy the build definitions. You can do that either manually, or you can create a little app that does that for you.

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