TFS 2012->TFS2015 upgrade: Test case migration issue - Bug work item type not in RequirementCategory

Question

We are facing a pretty difficult issue and need assistance desperately.Hoping you can give us some direction?

Detail: We have recently migrated from TFS 2012 Update 4 to TFS 2015 Update 1. We are currently centralizing all our work by migrating to a single team project (for the purpose of this post I’ll refer it as CentralProject). Earlier, teams were working in their own team projects and Testers were capturing their test plans, test suites and test cases in those team projects.

However as we are migrating teams to the “CentralProject” now, we need to migrate their test plans, test suites and test cases as well to CentralProject.

To migrate testing artifacts we are using “MTMCopyTool” which is actually a really nice utility but during migration we are facing following error:

“The following work item type is not valid: Bug. You must specify a valid work item type that belongs to the category with reference name Microsoft.RequirementCategory.”

To find the root cause of issue we exported the Category.xml file (from the process template) from both the projects (The old Team specific project as well as the new CentralProject).

Note:

a. We have run the “Configure Features” wizard on the CentralProject and NOT on team specific project.

b. All our team projects (old and new) are based on the Scrum template.

When we compared both Category.xml files, we found that the bug Bug work item is categorized as a Microsoft.RequirementCategory for the older team specific project.

<CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.RequirementCategory" name="Requirement Category">
  <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Product Backlog Item" />
  <WORKITEMTYPE name="Bug" />
</CATEGORY>

Whereas for CentralProject the category configuration is as follows:

<CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.RequirementCategory" name="Requirement Category">
  <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Product Backlog Item" />
</CATEGORY>

To fix this issue we have tried following workarounds:

1. Modified the exported Category.xml file of CentralProject, added the Bug work item type to Microsoft.RequirementCategory and imported it. After import we found following issue (TF400917). Error message

When we ran the Feature Enablement wizard it reset our imported settings by reverting the Category configuration to default and again we get the same error mentioned previously.

2. We tried another option to configure the Bug behavior manually and set “Bugs appear on the backlogs and boards with requirements” option but still get same error as mentioned above.

We request your to guidance to solve this issue.

Please also see the following references that we used while performing the analysis:

The first reference shows that the Bug work item type is indeed under the Microsoft.RequirementCategory category.

The second describes the two workarounds that we attempted to implement.

References: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd469527.aspx

Regards, Shikhar Jain

Answer 1

Try to open the Bug work items in Excel, and copy the Bugs from "old" Excel to "New" Excel, and then Publish them. You may get errors during the publish, check the details and edit the work items when necessary.