SWE/UX

Our team recently decided to move from the Light Weight Scrum TFS template to the much richer Conchango Scrum V2.2 template. We found that this template has a very faithful representation of the Scrum methodology, and certain available tools such as the WPF taskboard and EpiServer’s open source Scrum dashboard make it even more appealing.

As you might already know, there are currently no tools available out-of-the-box to migrate projects between templates (especially while maintaining history). The only effort currently underway (albeit a very significant one) is the TFS to TFS migration tool, based on the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit, both being developed by TFS team members. However, those tools will not take care of the logic of migrating work items’ custom fields between templates (especially also following workflow rules).

Therefore, and given that we felt it was important to keep project and work item history, I decided to set out to craft out a tool to perform that migration. The basic idea is to iterate each changeset, and each work item revision on the source project, and repeating those operations on the target project. While migrating the work items, we also migrate attachments (easy), and links (not quite as easy). The results up to now have been very encouraging.

I believe that it might be beneficial to the community if a tool such as this was published on CodePlex, since there is not much information out there on how to perform a large task like this, and what little information exists is scattered in bits and pieces (mostly originating from the TFS team). This tool could be adapted to other templates with relative ease. Considering the amount of work involved in documenting this project and turning it into a blog series, I would ask you to leave a comment here if you are interested in having access to the tool. If there is sufficient interest, I will try to put this tool up on CodePlex, and write up a few blog posts detailing its inner workings.