VSTS Rangers Projects – TFS Migration Tools: Query => Is the migration from one process template to another a plausible scenario?

This post invites you for input on a possible scenario we are considering as part of the guidance for the VSTS Rangers TFS Migration Tools project, which is listed as one of the VSTS Rangers initiatives mentioned in the index post here. We would appreciate your candid input, either by adding a comment to this blog post, or by contacting me directly.

The illustration shows a hypothetical scenario with two team projects, one based on the CMMI process template and the other on Agile. The Version Control (VC) data is migrated/synchronised as is, while the Work Item Tracking (WIT) data is migrated/synchronised with a re-mapping/translation between CMMI and Agile.

While there are other tools focused on Work Item Tracking data mapping, export and import, we are investigating the feasibility of including this specific scenario in our migration guidance and making it available as a viable scenario in the TFS Migration Tools solution. The latter is obviously not just focused on Work Item Tracking (WIT) data, but migration/synchronisation of Version Control (VC) and linking between WIT and VC as well.

So what are the questions?

1. Do you have environments that would like to move a team project from one project template, i.e. CMMI, to another project template, i.e. Agile? This is typically a result of a team project team selecting one process template and realising during the development cycle that they selected the wrong process template, or alternatively by organisational changes that are linked with methodology changes.
2. If you answered yes to (1), which process templates would be most relevant?
3. Would there be a need to synchronise two team projects with different process templates, or would the need be primarily a migration from type A to type B?

Thanking you for your candid feedback!

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 30, 2009
  EH:

1. Yes
2. CMMI --> Agile or Scrum
3. Migration Other then that: what I also see is when a team project is created, the level of granularity is not always the best choosen option. It is either too small or to big. Do you have these things also on the backlog?

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2009
  A merge of the SDL process template into other templates would be really useful.

• Anonymous
  August 02, 2009

1. Yes
2. Agile --> CMMI or Scrum (yes indeed)
3. Migration I aggree on the resizing story, so migrating should be flexible (migrate from A to B and then C to B as well or choose parts and migrate from A to B partly and A to C partly).

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2009

1. Yes
2. Some should be migrated to our own Agile based template. It will be nice to have a generic solution to do the mappings and the mappings will be provided e.g. from the community
3. Migration

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2009

1. Yes.
2. As Chris' response above, a generic solution to do the mappings.
3. Syncrhonise, so a Team can try the new template and if it turns out the grass is not greener there is always the old project to return to.  Also team members can move across to the new template as and when they are ready.

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2009

1. Yes.
2. Instead of converting the entire project from one template to other one, I think it’s better to allow project admin to configure the project template to add/remove work item type from other template (e.g. add “Change Request” work item type from CMMI to Agile Template)
3. Migration

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2009

1. Yes.
2. VSTS Scrum -> Conchango Scrum template.
3. Migration. My team had this need in the beginning of the year, and I actually set out to write a tool to do the migration for us. It look a bit of effort, but in the end, it was very successful and seamless migration. Its success tells me that Microsoft should actually support this scenario.

• Anonymous
  August 31, 2009
  Yes. I would like to see how I can convert my Conchango Scrum to Agile Project template. Somehow, Scrum didn't fly for us but we are definitely agile in many ways. Right now, we are stuck with Scrum and so wondering if there's an "easy" way to move to agile template on the existing TFS project.

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2009

1. Yes
2. Customized Agile to VSTS 2010 Agile with Test Case and Requirement work items
3. One Way Migration We are building new work items for Requirements, Business rules and Test Case work item templates in VSTS 2008 as they are missing from the MSF Agile template. I see they are not missing from VSTS 2010 and we will want to migrate our projects to those new templates as painlessly as possible. Will it be possible?

• Anonymous
  September 14, 2009
  What we need right now is

1. Yes
2.  Agile to CMMI
3. One Way Migration we chose Agile a long time ago but only want to begin using Work Item Tracking now - in CMMI. A generic tool sounds like a good idea

• Anonymous
  January 14, 2010
  Yes absolutely yes. This is the problem we have now. The new projects are SCRUM and the old one are still CMMI and honestly, there is not a very concrete, powerful and reliable tool that allows us to migrate the project without any pain. Of course if I am changing the project plan from Agile to Scrum I still want to keep the history of what was done in the past. Especially by the fact that we have the work item attached to the check-in and the builds.

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2010

1. Yes (when TFS 2010 / VS 2010 hits the shelves)
2. From MSF Agile 4.0/4.1/4.2 to MSF Agile 5.0. Specifically Scenarios to User stories and with that, hierarchical work items.
3. The need would primarily be a migration. We were following the original MSF Agile (4.1/4.2) loosly with most of our projects, no Risks and Quality of Service stuff, just the scenarios tasks and bugs. Our parent company is more into Scrum, and with both development teams starting to work more and more on shared projects, migrating our existing projects to a more Scrum like (MSF Agile 5.0) methodology would be a very welcome scenario.

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2010

1. Yes
2. Update from customized template - to the same one - just with the new fields of 2010
3. Migration

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2010

1. Yes
2. Moving from MSF for Agile 4.2 template to Scrum for Team System by Conchango.
3. Primarily a migration A long-running project that has originally been migrated from SVN to the [default] MSF Agile template and now has different needs and a change of template is really needed. We would obviously like to directly migrate existing work item types to new ones. While this doesn't seem hard to support, the benefits would be enormous.

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2010
  Thank you for all the feedback and the overwhealming confirmation that a migration from one process template to another is a plausible solution. We are investigating the feasibility of creating a range of configuration files with the relevant value and field mapping rules to allow migration from a set of known process templates to another  set of known process templates. While we cannot cater for all possible combinations, the configuration file for a TFS Integration Platform session can be customised to meet your specific needs where needed. Watch this space for news on this topic.

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2010
  1 - Yes 2 - CMMI to Scrum for Team System 3 - Primary need is a One-way migration We have additional custom fields we have added which we would want to map during the process. This was done for two reasons (Certain fields in the CMMI template were not reportable by default, so we had to create different ones for the same basic purposes and we had to add some kind of per developer time-tracking to other custom fields for capatilization reporting)

• Anonymous
  April 08, 2010
  1.) YES. Our corporate servers are still in TFS 2008 with Agile 4.2 2.) From Agile 4.2 to Agile 5.0 3.) One way migration

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2013
  1 - Yes 2 - Agile 4.x --> Scrum 2.1 (Still stuck on Agile template that what was available with TFS 2008) 3 - Migration

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2013
  1- Yes (this has been a huge negative for TFS for us) 2- Scrum for Team System (from EMC/Conchango) to VS Scrum (latest version) 3- One way migration Basically, we'd like to switch process templates and at least keep source control history. Work item (and related) data is important, but the source history is a must that has been a real pain.

• Anonymous
  September 01, 2015
  Has the CMMI to Scrum migration tool been built?  I am in need of this as type of tool.