CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tfs
merekel
merekel

Reputation: 443

Can a TFS Product Backlog Item be moved to a new project?

I have a PBI in TFS under ProjectA with an iteration and area value filled in. Is it possible to move this PBI to ProjectB without creating a new PBI?

I am not seeing a way in the Visual Studio UI to do this. If I try to manually type in the area path of ProjectB, Visual Studio says that the path cannot be found.

I am using Team Foundation Server 2013 and Visual Studio Ultimate 2013.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3344

Answers (4)

katzbatz
katzbatz

Reputation: 365

See my related answer. Though not applicable to TFS on-premise, one can now do this with Azure Boards in Azure DevOps.

Upvotes: 0

ergohack
ergohack

Reputation: 1378

EDIT: This does not work for TFS2017 and forwards.

Yes, see http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1018002/Yes-You-Can-Move-TFS-WorkItems-Between-Projects for a downloadable utility, source and a more detailed explaination.

It is a backdoor, SQL Manager approach, not supported by Microsoft, but it works for me. Here is the SQL:

UPDATE [Tfs_xxx].[dbo].[WorkItemsAre] SET AreaID=@AreaID,IterationID=@IterationID WHERE ID=@WorkItemID
UPDATE [Tfs_xxx].[dbo].[WorkItemsLatest] SET AreaID=@AreaID,IterationID=@IterationID WHERE ID=@WorkItemID
UPDATE [Tfs_xxx].[dbo].[WorkItemsWere] SET AreaID=@AreaID,IterationID=@IterationID WHERE ID=@WorkItemID

With the Tfs_xxx being replaced with Tfs_<your collection database name>.

Essentially, the project is inherited from the Area and the Iteration. Changing these from the current project to the target project causes the workitem to "move" to the target project. Additional rough edges are that the assignment pool or the workflow states might not align and have to be edited mannually in the UI to get the workitem back in the flow of the target project.

Upvotes: 2

MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood
MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood

Reputation: 23444

I would go a little deeper and say that if you need this feature then you should not have two Team Projects in the first place.

http://nakedalm.com/one-team-project/

The term that I use is:

"If you have artifacts that interact, with artifacts defined as people, code, or work items, then they should be in a single Team Project"

http://nakedalm.com/creating-nested-teams-visual-studio-alm/

Using a single Team Project can give you many more capabilities at the backlog/ work tracking perspective. Like the nested teams described above.

Upvotes: 2

Daniel Mann
Daniel Mann

Reputation: 59055

No. Work items cannot be moved between team projects.

The reason is simple: The process template of the team project defines the work items. Team projects can have different templates. What if you tried to move a work item from a team project using a Scrum template to one using a CMMI template?

Upvotes: 4

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