Visual Studio Team System is a productive, integrated, and extensible software development life-cycle tools platform that helps software teams by improving communication and collaboration throughout the software development process
Visual Studio Team Foundation offers powerful integration features by knocking down the wall between source control, work item tracking, build management by enabling project contributors to associate work items with other types of configuration items, or artifacts. There are four types of artifacts in Visual Studio Team Foundation: work items, source files, changesets, which are the products of a check in operation, and builds. A work item can contain links to the other three artifact types. Read more about VSTS at Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Overview
A common question for teams planning to use VSTS is- what will happen to my existing work items and source codes? Do we have a migration story here?
My team is involved in the development of Migration Tools for Software Configuration Management Tools and Work Item Tracking Tools of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. We have a migration tool for migrating source code from Visual Source Safe to VSTS Source Control and a migration tool for migrating work items from Rational ClearQuest to VSTS work item tracking system.
Visual Source Safe to VSTS Source Control Migration Tool
This tool will migrate existing Visual SourceSafe repository to Team Foundation Source Control System. Team Foundation includes this conversion utility, VSSConverter.exe that you can use to perform this migration. This tool will migrate data including history to Team Foundation.
Before doing the migration, it is highly recommended to run VSS analyze utility to fix any VSS database corruption issues. This will help to fix any VSS database inconsistencies or database corruptions to avoid data loss during migration process.
VSSConverter has an analyze option. Do not get confused with VSSConverter analyze option with VSS analyze utility mentioned above. During VSSConverter analysis phase, it analyzes the existing VSS repository and generates an analysis report. This gives useful information to help in migration process like the list of checked out files which you need to check in before migration. During the migration phase, this tool will migrate the data from VSS repository to Team Foundation version control system. At the end of migration this tools will generate a migration report, which gives you the details of migrations with any errors/warning generated during migration.
To understand more about the usage of this tool to migrate your existing Visual SourceSafe repository to Team Foundation, please refer the walk through: Walkthrough: Migrating from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation .
Check out some nice blogs from my colleagues on VSSConverter: Akash's blog on planning for migration, Ankur's blog on how VSSConverter works and Nagendra's blog for post migration steps.
Rational ClearQuest to VSTS Work Item Tracking Migration Tool
This tool will migrate existing ClearQuest work items (schema and data) to VSTS work item tracking system. Team Foundation includes this conversion utility, CQConverter.exe, that you can use to perform this migration.
CQConverter has an analysis option where it generates the schemas (work item type definition in xml format) based on the migration query. The generated work item types correspond to the entity type definition in ClearQuest. The schema generated by this tool is configurable; you can modify it to suite to your requirement before or after migration. During migration phase, this tool will migrate data from all entities (work items) in the selected query including history.
To understand more about the usage of this tool to migrate your existing ClearQuest work items to VSTS work item tracking, please refer the walk through: Walkthrough: Migrating ClearQuest Work Items to Team Foundation
Post your questions on VSS, ClearQuest Converters on Visual Studio Team System General or Visual Studio Team Foundation Forums or contact me at gijov at microsoft.com.