we are currently using VSTS to store all our projects.
At the start, we decided to put every work into the same project, and split them using area when creating epics, pbis etc. For multiple reasons, we have decided to split our work into different project that now represent clients.
Moving the cards is quite painful, because the option given only moves the card to a given sprint, and do not move the parent cards or the child card. For exemple: I'm moving the PBI1 from the project ACME to the project EMCA, both have the same number of sprint, EMCA is a duplicate of ACME in that sense. The problem is when moving PBI1 in ECMA, all the child tasks stayed in ACME.
Is there a better way to transfer all my work to the new project?
Thank you
One way to do it is to connect VSTS to Excel to make the transfer.
Marketplace Add-in VSTS Open in Excel
Once you have done that, you can Save your original Project's Epics, Stories, etc. in Excel format.
Then open your other Project and Insert your Epics, Stories, etc. from that Excel document.
You can use VSTS Sync Migration Tools, this tool support bulk migration of work items with the links:
LinkMigrationContext - Migrates all the work item links, both
between work items and external links.
There are two ways to use these tools:
Install from Chocolatey
Download the latest release from GitHub and unzip.
Find here the documentation and how to migrate the work items with the links.
Related
I have a TFS 2015 installation where we have a rather big number of projects. Currently there are old projects, that aren't used anymore but need to stay available as an archive (read only).
I'd like to make a workspace or something in TFS so that these projects normally don't come up in the normal view.
One way I found out is to set the TFS offline, make a copy of the database, bring the copy of the database online and then delete all projects that are still active and rename it. After that bring back online the original database and delete all archived projects.
This can be done once. Maybe once a year, but it will result in a large number of databases. This will make it worse than leaving the inactive projects in the workspace.
Does anyone have better idea? Or: What do you do with old projects?
First, there currently is no archiving function on TFS. However you can use something else as a workaround. To do this, you can either create a project designated as archived that you then have to assign permissions to and so on or move the project into another collection using the TFS Integration Toolkit.
Set the Read permission to Deny of contributor group will hidden the collection to come up in the normal view.
Below are some related blogs for your reference:
How to: Archive Team Foundation Server Team Projects
completely archive a TFS2012 project
Moreover, there has been a feature request in UserVoice, you can also vote up it to get more attention.
The process you are using (cloning a collection) would be the only method to achieve an archive as you describe it.
I would start by understanding why you have so many projects! Prefer larger Team Projects that contain many Products, Projects, Teams that are easier to manage.
I’m beginning to consider moving an on-prem TFS 2012 installation to Visual Studio Online. So, one of the first things I started investigating was how we might export our content back out of VSO in the future if we ever decided we needed to. The more I’m looking, the less I’m finding. It seems there was a temporary time period when VSO first went GA that Microsoft offered that capability if you asked to have it done (http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-apr-3-vso.aspx). By implication, that would seem to mean that this isn’t something that is a planned feature of VSO.
Making a commitment to house all of my source and ALM data in a repository I’d effectively be barred from leaving doesn’t sound particularly appealing. Am I missing something, or does Microsoft really not have export capabilities on their VSO product roadmap? It would seem that this would be a show-stopper for many organizations from coming onto VSO, which is a perfect application to put into the cloud IMHO.
For code you can use Git. Even if you start with TFVC, you can use Git-TF. Clone with the --deep parameter to get the full history in a new Git repo, then push back to a new project (Git or TFVC).
For work items the TEAM tab in Microsoft Excel is a very capable export facility for work items, though you don't get links (other than parent child), or attachments.
In the original project, create a query that lists all your work items.
Open Excel, go to the TEAM tab and click 'New List', you should get the option to select your project and the query you just created.
In the Work Items tab select the 'Choose Columns' button and select all the columns you want to migrate.
If migrating to another TFS / VSO project, create that project, open another list in Excel connected to the new project.
Cut and paste all the work items from the original project list to the new project list (excluding the Id column).
Publish.
voilà.
You're right there's no good solution for this yet. However, if you're using Git as the source-control back-end (instead of TFVC), you can easily pull down the entire repo then push it up into any other source control server (non-VSO) with full history.
For TFVC source-control, or work items (or builds, test results, etc), things aren't so easy.
The answer is not black and white: with the TFS Client API you can connect to both platform and read/write as you please. It is not a trivial task, so someone has created tooling, like Brian says. Another option is using the open source TFS Integration Platform: it is complex but with some help you can do it.
What you really must consider and plan is the data model: moving from an ALM Platform to another is never trivial and the complexity lies in the difference of the underlying model and any customization you made.
As long as you do not customize you on-prem TFS, it is very doable, with a reasonable effort to move to VSO and back. In this context customize means: custom workitems fields, types or workflows, server-side plugins; shortly anything that requires code or schema change. Note that you can still customize builds as this is properly managed.
I expect to see more solutions arriving thanks to the new REST API, but it will take time before we see solid products.
So your original question has a positive answer (TFS on-prem -> VSO) using OpsHub, but know what you are doing and, as I write, it is practically a one way journey.
In our current project we have four different TFS2010 Team Projects in the same Team Project Collection. The reason for this is that different parts of the project wanted to use different team project templates (CMMI vs Agile).
All projects now use the same template. Therefore we have now reached the conclusion that it would be better to merge the projects into a single team project. This raises several questions:
Is it possible / feasible to use one of the existing projects as the target project for the other three?
How do we move our existing work items into the new project whilst maintaining our area tree? We hope to create one root area for each of our existing team projects, and move all work items / areas underneath this root node.
Today we have work item links from one team projects into another - how do we keep these links when merging?
What is the best practice when moving the source code? One clear approach is to simply copy it to the new location, and locking and keeping the old team projects in case we need to access older versions of the code. But is it feasible to use branching for this, e.g. branching all existing code to the new team project? What kind of problems might this approach cause?
Thanks for your help!
Unfortunately, TFS 2010 doesn't allow you to merge team projects.
Stucturing Team Projects and Team Project Collections is one of the most important strategy decisions to make before starting to use TFS. Unfortunately, a lot of the customers we help don't make the up-front planning necessary and don't understand some of the limitations in TFS around merging, moving, splitting, etc. team projects before they start diving in to using TFS :(
When we have consulting engagements where customers want to consolidate their team projects, we end up having to do a lot of manual work to migrate the artifacts. We have built some tools to help us with this process for work items but for the most part it's a lot of tedious consulting work. The migration utilities always end up needing to be customized for each customer as well since they usually have different business rules for how they want to migrate.
Ultimately, a "migration" doesn't end up bringing over all of the information and you end up with some other problems like date/time stamps being different from what they were originally. (I have heard it referred to as a time compression issue with migrations.)
Some additional thoughts for each of your original questions:
Sure, you could theoretically use one of the existing team projects as the target for the migration of the other three. As long as you like the team project name and don't want to rename the team project. :)
This is where we have built custom work item migration utilities to assist our consulting customers. You would likely need to do the same.
This is possible as well with a custom work item migration utility. You can just keep track of the mappings between old work item IDs and new work item IDs and then add the links later once all of the new work items are created in the target team project.
That's ultimately up to you. I would do a "move" version control operation on the source code from the old team project to the new team project. This maintains everything. However, I would not delete any of the old team projects because that will cause the version control history to be destroyed as well.
It's not the best story for you but hopefully it will help your planning out some!
I am looking for a way to combine several project lists in SharePoint so that I can display all open tasks associated with any project in one table and have a Gantt chart reflecting the same.
Any other suggestions for keeping track of a team of project managers are more than welcome!
Thanks,
Karl
I went to great lengths to prototype a PM like tool using three (3) Lists: Projects, Deliverables and Tasks. Long story is below, short version... if you looking for a complex PM solution (say 10 projects, with 5 deliverables per project, and 10 tasks per deliverables) with dependencies, I would try to buy an external SharePoint plugin. The issue is I haven't found a way to create dependencies. So if you get a request for a high priority project, you insert your new project, it won't push out the other items. We are looking into some of these SharePoint plugins, but nothing concrete yet.
Long Story... I created a page, with the 3 web part being those lists, and using connections, I tied the lists together to filter down. That work pretty well, but again the issue is the lack of dependencies and being able to easily shift projects/deliverables/tasks.
I am pretty new to TFS but I have some experience with VSS. I like to know your opinions of what would be the best way of working with TFS in the following scenario:
We are a group of developers working on projects. All projects starts from a common base code. All projects are one man only, no code sharing until the project is done. A project can last from a few hours to several months, no code is merged until done. Any developer works simultaneously on more than one project, usually 7-10 projects at a time. Usually the projects only involve a small numbers of files that are changed/created (10-20) but rely on a large group of infrastructure files that change quite often. However, any change in infrastructure is not considered until the merge, so we don't get latest version from server until the final build.
An additional request is that, when merged, we’d like to use a 3 way merge tool. We use this approach in VSS, via a custom made application and it works very well. However this involves special file management, for example every file that has to be changed must have an original version saved somewhere that will be used as the “root” file for the 3 way merge process.
What do you think?
You should take a look at the Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010. (direct download). In that package, there is a PowerPoint deck that walks you through a series of possible branching structures.
It sounds like you want either "Branch by project" or "Branch by developer" (since you only have one developer per project, these are effectively the same).
Regarding the 3-way merge tool, take a look at this list to see how to configure your favorite diff/merge tools.