Keeping Azure DevOps organisations inherited process templates in sync

author Richard Fennell calendar Nov 29, 2018 · 4 min read · Tech Tips VSTS VSTS  ·
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The problem

If you are like me for historic reasons you have multiple Azure DevOps organisations (instances) backed by the same Azure Active Directory (AAD). In my case for example: one was created when Azure DevOps was first released as TFSPreview.com and another is from our migration from on-prem TFS using the DB Migration Tools method; and I have others. I make active use of all of these for different purposes, though one is primary with the majority of work done on it, and so I want to make sure the inherited process templates are the same on each of them. Using the primary organisation as the master customisation. Note I have already converted all my old on-premises XML process models to inherited process templates. There is no out the box way to do keep processes in syncs, but it is possible using a few tools. The main one is the Microsoft Process Migrator for Node on GitHub.

The Solution

Firstly I cloned the Microsoft Process Migrator and built it as per the instructions on the repo. I created a config file and then ran the tool. On one organisation it ran fine. However on another I had errors like: [ERROR] [2018-11-26T14:35:44.880Z] Process import validation failed. Process with same name already exists on target account. [ERROR] [2018-11-26T14:39:54.206Z] Import failed, see log file for details. Create field 'Location' failed, see log for details This was because I had in the past manually duplicated the inherited process template onto this organisation, so there was a process with the same name and fields of the same names. The first error was easy to fix, import the template with a new (temporary) name. The second is more problematic. I had two choice

As I only had a few duplicated unused fields on a single organisation I picked the former. If I had many organisations to sort out I would picked the latter. So my process ended up being

  1. Run the Microsoft Process Migrator to migrate ‘My Process’ on the source organisation to ‘My Process 1’ on the target organisation
  2. It gave an error, providing the name of the duplicated field
  3. I checked on the target organisation using a work item query that the field was empty or only had defaulted data (if it had not been I would have used Martin’s tool to migrate the data to a temporary field and then deleted the problem field, moving the data back to the correct field from the temporary field when the import of the process template was completed)
  4. I deleted the field from the work item type that referenced it
  5. I deleted the field
  6. I deleted the process template ‘My Process 1’, a failed import leaves a half created process
  7. I went back to step 1 and repeated until the import completed without error
  8. I tested my migrated inherited process was OK
  9. On the target organisation I then renamed ‘My Process’ to ‘My Process – Old’
  10. I then renamed ‘My Process 1’ to ‘My Process’
  11. In my case I also made ‘My Process’ as the default, you might not do this if another process is the default, but step 13 does require the process template is not the default
  12. I moved all the team projects using the process template now called ‘My Process – Old’ to ‘My Process’
  13. I was then able to delete the process template ‘My Process – Old’ as it has no associated team projects and was not the default

As I customise my primary organisation’s process templates I can repeat this process to keep the processes in sync between organisations.  Note that in future migrations I won’t have to do steps 2..6 as there are no manually created duplicated fields. So it should be more straight forward. So a valid solution until any similar functionality is built into Azure DevOps, and there is no sign of that on the roadmap.