Sila’s Custom Tool Improves Migration To Azure DevOps
At-a-Glance
Our global manufacturing client needed help migrating their existing backlog management systems (TFS and VersionOne) to Azure DevOps. They wanted to take advantage of Azure DevOps’s multiple components, such as Boards, Repositories, and Pipelines. Sila provided project planning and execution skills, combined with technical data integration efforts. Sila also designed and built a Sila-proprietary automated migration tool to fill a void in the marketplace for migrating VersionOne data to Azure Boards.
Objectives
Multiple programs across our manufacturing client wanted to implement a unified solution for DevOps to streamline product development across teams and facilitate reporting.
Our client stakeholders planned to migrate data from the legacy Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and VersionOne systems to Azure DevOps Boards. Azure Boards is a customizable backlog management solution compatible with all levels of the Scaled Agile framework. Azure DevOps would also provide opportunities to integrate work items with Azure DevOps’ Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. In addition to the enhanced DevOps framework, our client hoped to:
Offer better data integration to improve the visibility of work, including access to historical data
Improve communication across teams
Improve communication and reporting between teams and portfolio management
Improve business decision-making with streamlined and accelerated access to information
Sila’s Impact
After seeing a gap in the marketplace, Sila designed, built, and implemented a custom tool to migrate VersionOne data to Azure DevOps Boards. The tool’s success allows data migration to happen with minimal involvement from client team members. Sila’s tool eliminates time-consuming data entry by removing the need for manual data extraction and data entry into Azure DevOps, resulting in cost savings. The solution maintains referential integrity between work items, supports embedded and attached document transfer, and produces higher quality data as it eliminates rework when manually copying data from one system to the other.
Sila guided the client stakeholders with expert project planning and execution efforts. A four-phased approach was implemented using Sila’s custom data migration tool, combined with technical data integration best practices.
1. Migration planning
Sila identified the core migration team; estimated and scheduled the effort; analyzed existing team workflows and existing backlogs, and captured requirements. Sila educated teams on the benefits of the product and helped make configuration decisions while providing continuous readiness assessments.
2. Migration preparation
Sila implemented Azure DevOps related organizational and technical standards and established roles and permissions. During this phase, Sila also built and configured project environments and set custom parameters within the migration tool.
3. Migration execution
The team ensured data accuracy through a multi-stage migration validation process before promoting the configuration to production and loading the data. Using our custom-built tool, our team was able to rapidly migrate data within tight activation schedules.
4. Post-migration
Sila provided post-production support to the team, including building queries and dashboards and addressing user questions.
Benefits
The benefits of using Sila’s migration tool rapidly increase with higher data volumes and complexity. The automated tool reduces the risk of errors inherent in extracting, transforming, and loading large amounts of data manually. This results in a high-quality migration, with data that can be trusted.
With multiple successful migrations to Azure DevOps, Sila’s proven process and custom tools can help your business implement a unified solution for DevOps with limited interruption and high fidelity data.