Migrating Legacy Defect Data to TFS

Not too much new here. We just passed the halfway mark in our TFS migration and so far everything is pretty good. A few minor issues like the AD displayName not syncing with TFS, but nothing too major. Knock on wood.

There are a number of posts on this, but I thought I'd add my experiences with migrating legacy defect data to TFS. Like most everyone else, we simply used Excel with the TFS plug-in. Here is our process.

- Lock down the legacy defect management tool so it's read only.
- Export the data to Excel. We just migrated the open defects.
- Map the fields. For example, Owner in old tool with the format "FirstName LastName" mapped to Assigned To in TFS with the format of "LastName, FirstName (Company)". This is actually the hardest part.
- Run the Publish.
- Verify results.

The one thing we did that really helped was to migrate the legacy ID number to a simple text field in TFS. This allowed the user a reference to go back and look at data we were unable to migrate like state history.

Good luck with your migrations!