Release Management Workflow Migrator

Willy-P. Schaub

December 15th, 20150 0

Looking to export a Release Management agent based deployment pipeline so that it can be reused in the Release Management service in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)?

We have released a migration tool and associated guidance as an open source project, allowing you to use “as is” or contribute to the project. If a Pull Request shows up at the door for the source or documentation, it will definitely be considered.

What’s the driving goal, in the words of Daniel Mann?

Driving goal of the tool wasn’t to provide a zero-effort, one-button migration path from RM server -> RM service, but rather to give users, that had already invested a ton of effort in designing complex agent-based release templates, a way to get those release templates into an RM service-friendly form with a minimum amount of rewriting.

The intended user is one who:

Has a lot of complex agent-based workflows
Has minimal knowledge of PowerShell/DSC/Chef
Has no bandwidth to acquire that knowledge in the short-term
Has a desire to switch to the new RM service (for better metrics, to retire the RM server, whatever)

So with those 4 design principles in mind, we opted to not interact with the new RM service. The original goal was to worry about the “from”, not the “to”.

Who’s in the team?

Product owner – Vijay Machiraju
Feature team SME – Shashank Bansal
Development team – Daniel Mann, Dave McKinstry, David Pitcher, Derrick Cawthon, Josh Garverick, Josh Sommer, Niel Zeeman, Richard Albrecht, Richard Fennell, Sergio Romero, Shaun Mullis, Stawinski Fabio, Vladimir Gusarov, and William Salazar.

We are looking for early adopters!

We are looking for users that are interested to evaluate the migrator, work with the team and help us improve the solution. Early adoption engagements can optionally include internal-only or public testimonials similar to the “Circle of love” at Universidad Rafael Landívar to share your success story.