Converters for VSTS
Hi All,
I’m Amit Agrawal, one of the program managers working on Visual Studio Team Systems. I spend time on team build, work item converters and source control converters. Most of my focus is on work item converters. What is a work item converter? As you may be aware, we are shipping a brand new work item tracking system with VSTS. Converters allow you to import data from an existing work item tracking system into VSTS. We call it migrating data from your work item tracking system to VSTS. ‘Migration’ is the term we thought best describes what the converters are doing.
There are two parts to the migration process:
1. Schema migration where the converter reads in the database schema from your work item tracking system and generates equivalent representation in VSTS. By schema we mean things such as fields present in a particular work item type, data type of those fields, work flow as in different states that a work item can transition to and the set of allowed trasitions, set of allowed values for a field and the users defined in your work item system. Not all work item tracking systems allow us to read the schema information, so not all converters will have schema migration.
2. Data migration where the converter migrates the individual work items from your work item tracking system to VSTS work item tracking system. The data migration includes migrating the current view of the work item, the history whenever possible, links and attachments, so post migration you get the complete data in VSTS.
We realized that there are a lot of work item tracking systems out there in the market. One web site lists 100+ work item tracking systems. So we identified a few systems that we are going to ship converters for. We will document the process so that you can write your own converter for other work item tracking systems. So far we have made converters for IBM’s ClearQuest and for our internal work item tracking system.
The ClearQuest converter does both schema migration and data migration. It reads in schema information from ClearQuest and generates equivalent schema i.e. work item type in VSTS. Then it reads work items from ClearQuest and migrates them to VSTS into that schema. Apart from the migrating the current view of the work item, it migrates links, attachments and history. There is also handling for duplicate work items. A few things such as script based rules are not migrated. The whole migration process is driven by a set of XML files and you can change these files to affect the migration. E.g. you can change these XML files to specify any data transformations, field type changes or field name changes.
We are also shipping a few source control converter(s) that will let you migrate data from your existing source control systems to VSTS source control. Please see Akash’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/akashmaheshwari for details on that. We would love to hear from you about your needs and the kind of converters that will make your move to VSTS easier. I will write about the migration process in some detail in future postings.
