We're starting to user Team Foundation Server and my boss would like some way to "archive" projects. Meaning after they are completed, remove them from an "active" state so that only "active" projects are visible.
Does anyone have any experience with this?
I've thought of 2 options.
1) Create 2 base projects. 1 for active projects and 1 for achived projects
2) Remove all users from the archived projects.
Thanks,
Sam
I would personally recommend waiting for TFS 2010 when more functionality will be introduced that will assist you in the ability to "archive" Team Projects.
In TFS 2010 you will hopefully be able to move a team project to a new Team Project Collection. Actually you do this by duplicating your "active" project collection and then deleting all the team projects from it apart from the one that you want archived. In this active project collection, delete the archived project that you have a copy of in the duplicated project collection. This archived team project will then live in it's own project collection which means it has it's own database etc which can be easily backed up / archived etc.
The archived team project project collection can then be left as it is as it doesn't slow down the server any if not being used - or it could even be detached from the TFS Application instance so that it doesn't show up at all and re-attached at any time.
An advantage of using project collections in TFS 2010 is that full Version Control and Work Item Tracking history will be maintained.
I would use it just as you normally do, but when you are done with the project then you remove it from the visible list. (In Visual Studio you can right click on a project in the team explorer and say remove.)
If you are worried about changes after the project is done, then remove the users from the contributors list. If you really want to boot the users out (so they cannot even see it) then you can deny them rights to the project.
This way you don't have to see it, but you can keep all your projects on the base level.
I would NOT recommend having just 2 base project for active and in-active. A TFS project should not be based on a state.
We created an "Archive" team project and we regularly move unused source code to that team project. It has worked out well for us, the history is preserved so we can always reference the archive project for old code or information on past changes. We also limit access such that developers have read access but only TFS administrators have write access. I haven't checked to see how these moves impact the association of check-ins with work items - mostly because everything we archived was checked in before we moved to TFS.
As for the one active team project, I was led to believe by knowledge experts and online documentation that this wasn't the best way to organize team projects. I think ideally you group projects/solutions together into a single team project if they are related (i.e. by line of business or dependencies).
I'm sure you've already done your research, but there is plenty of documentation out there that might assist (especially if your team maintains a single application or a handful of applications). I would suggest starting with patterns & practices: Team Development with TFS.
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've recently completed the deployment of TFS 2015 Update 1, we have around 15 development teams in the UK and previously we have always structured our TFS projects as follows:
Default Collection
Application 1 (Team Project)
Application 2 (Team Project)
This caused issues with sharing work items across teams as it is difficult to move WI's across the project boundary.
Rather than create a new team project for each team, I want to manage things with a single team project and create separate areas\iterations\teams for each one. So:
Project Collection > Master Team Project > Area 1
Area 2
Area 3
etc
in terms of permissions I would like to add in each of the standard TFS permission groups to each area. I would also like to create a root folder for source control for each area.
At the moment I can't work out how to do this? Can anyone help?
I suggest you to look at the some community suggestion on this topic.
One Team Project to rule them all
Why You Should use a Single (Giant) TFS Team Project
How to implement a multiple team strategy in Team Foundation Server 2013
In general it is a good practice (I won't say best practice as it is not the right thing to do in some cases).
Regarding you question, you should focus on Team to define developers access, and TFS groups for general (e.g. administrative) access.
I'd recommend you to use the multiple teams feature in TFS2015. It allows you to manage the team members, permissions, work items more easily. And you can track the entire project status from the team project page and track the individual feature team status from their own project page. The work items can be also moved between the teams easily (Just change the area path). Refer to this link for details: Multiple Teams
Is there any way to move/migrate team projects of a Team project collection from one TFS server to another (both in TFS 2010 version). The destination Team Project collection contains a Team Project already and I want to move the source Team projects in to this particular team projects. So at the end I will have a Team Project which contains several projects in it. Is that possible? I want the history to be preserved as well.
If the above scenario is not possible, can I migrate Team projects from one server to another without going through the database backup-restore-TFS detach-attach process?
I thought of trying the TFSIntegration tool, but could see many people advised to avoid using this due to issues in it.
So if you have any information in accomplishing this, that would be great..
If you want all the history then you really only have 2 options:
TFS Integration platform - http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com/
Back up /restore the collection database - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd936138.aspx#Backup
I would recommend moving the database. This sounds pretty onerous but is actually quite easy.
Good Luck!
TFS INTEGRATION PLATFORM used for integration.
A tool which helps a lot named "witAdminUi".
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!
We have a project that will be developed in multiple phases over the next 12- 18 months. It's an agile-esque project in a waterfall environment, it that matters.
My initial thought was to create one team project named 'Project X'. Under Project X could be multiple solution folders but the main development would be in a folder called Main. Branching would be done as appropriate.
The other solution folders under the Project X team project would be for some of the tools we need to build for this project that are independ of the main app, which is a web app. For example, we needed to build an app for processing data and sending it to a web service but it never interacted or merged in any way with the main web app.
The advantages I see to this approach are a) all the code for the project is kept under a single team project and b) all the work items, bugs, wishlist items, are accessible from all the other projects.
Does this approach make sense? Any ideas to improve this? I haven't created the team project yet.
I will simply comment on the advantages you listed to help you understand why this approach isn't ideal.
The advantages I see to this approach
are a) all the code for the project is
kept under a single team project and
Both your tools and your web application are for "This project." That right there is a key indicator that you should use one Team Project inside of TFS. You gain nothing by having two separate Team Projects. In fact, you may make it more difficult to manage.
Consider if you have a requirement that has work one both a tool and the main application to complete. In your scenario, there would be no way to track work history associated to one requirement because you are using two Team Projects. There are many more reasons, you have to manage permissions in two places, have two sets of mappings etc etc.
I would highly recommend you opt to use one Team Project. You, and your entire team, will thank me later.
b) all the work items, bugs, wishlist
items, are accessible from all the
other projects
If you have two Team Projects, you cannot access WIs etc across the projects. In fact, you will have the exact opposite- you will have to create the WIs in both projects if the work crossed over between the two.
You should have one Team Project. A folder for the tools and a folder for the web application. From there you can take it further having it branched off- a branch for development and a branch for main is a good start. Inside each, have the tools and web application so the versions stay in sync.
Here is a good place to start reading before setting up your project: Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance.
What you're describing is not a Team Project. You're simply describing the structure of some source control folders in TFS.
A Team Project is a lot more than just source control. From T (Visual Studio ALM Glossary):
team project
The named collection of work items,
code, tests, work products, metrics,
and so forth, used by a defined team
with Visual Studio Team Foundation to
track a common set of related work.