Is it possible to share Deployment Groups across team projects in VS Team Services?
I have a few logically different team projects sharing the same servers. I would like to create one instance of deployment groups and share it across team projects
Currently, there is no way for this to span projects. In VSTS, very little spans projects for a variety of reasons such as security and pipeline management. Due to the way the pipeline works in VSTS, I don't think they will ever let this span multiple projects. You could always suggest it in the VSTS User Voice forum or get a more detailed explanation as to why not.
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I'm thinking to move to Azure DevOps. But I'm at the stage where it's hard to decide which option will be useful.
My Requirements:
Single dashboard for the current sprint to have transparency to
everyone in the team. No context switching.
Single backlog for all projects.
User stories & bug will be easily identified by project.
Reports by projects, teams, etc.
Service hooks - Microsoft teams, etc.
Source control - GIT.
Artifacts.
Test plans under one board.
I'm thinking of going with single project(multiple repositories)
But before going down this road I just want to know what are the pros and cons of both options.
In general, we recommend that you use a single project to support your organization or enterprise. A single project minimizes the maintenance of administrative tasks and supports the most optimized / full-flexibility cross-link object experience.
Even if you have many teams working on hundreds of different applications and software projects, you can most easily manage them within a single project. A project serves to isolate data stored within it. You can't easily move data from one project to another. When you move data from one project to another, you typically lose the history associated with that data.
So according to your situation, it is recommended to use a single project with multiple repos and multiple teams. For details you can refer to this official document.
Reasons to add another project
You may want to add another project in following instances:
To prohibit or manage access to the information contained within a
project to select groups
To support custom work tracking processes for specific business units
within your organization
To support entirely separate business units that have their own
administrative policies and administrators
To support testing customization activities or adding extensions
before rolling out changes to the working project
To support an Open Source Software (OSS) project
I am in an enterprise that creates many large to small scale applications. Way back when I started using Visual Studio Online/VSTS/now Azure devops I broke all of these apps out into different projects. However, now it seems there is good support for managing multiple apps in one project, and this seems easier from a management standpoint.
From the research I did it seems i can do each service individually:
Repos: Select Import Repository from the consolidated project and enter in the URL of the app i want to import BEWARE
Also, the system automatically resets the State and Reason fields to the default initial values for the work item type that you move.
and I skimmed over the docs and missed that snippet. oops
Boards: Go to query (optionally select query across project) and move all items to the consolidated project (creating the appropriate teams, areas and past sprints to keep history)
Builds: Export json from source projects and import to consolidated project
Releases: Same as Builds
(we do not use test plans or artifacts at the moment)
Doing it this way I probably will loose build and release history, which is probably not a big deal once enough time passes, but I did not find any other good way.
My two questions are:
Are there better guidelines to move entire projects to one project?
Will I permanently or temporary loose anything else besides the build and release history that I am not realizing?
I went through the same thing and had to do what you described. At the time there was no support for moving services/functions between Projects or Orgs at all, let alone consolidating into a single Project. Unless something's changed, short of automating via your own API scripting it's all manual.
The other watch outs were mainly around access and security:
External API integrations such as Web Apps, Function Apps, JIRA, Service Now
External inbound app authorisations
External outbound app authorisations such as Azure Service Principals
Variable Group authorisations to YAML Build Pipelines
Library reference updates including KeyVault
etc
This refactoring ended up being much more work than the platform consolidation itself.
I recently inherited the management of a few legacy applications and the associated development team of 3. Currently, the team manages work visa emails. There is no central place to see all work. Some of the projects have their own VSTS sites.
I would like have a single/ unified intake process, work board. Is there a way to have a VSTS site sit on top of other VSTS sites to provide this view. Other option I can think of is to bring in these applications as separate repositories under a single VSTS site ( assuming VSTS allows this).
Anyone with prior experience, please suggest other ways to do it. Yes, I am stuck with VSTS - corporate standard
If you are using git in VSTS, then you can have multiple repositories.
This would be a good approach. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/willy-peter_schaub/2014/11/19/many-git-repositories-but-one-team-project-to-rule-them-all/
Then you can create teams within the same team project to separate backlogs, sprints, kanbans for each team. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/scale/multiple-teams?view=vsts
You will also be able to see a kanban/backlog for the full team and you could even use the Plans hub to group all your teams together in a unified view. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/scale/review-team-plans?view=vsts and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/backlogs/backlogs-boards-plans?view=vsts
In Visual Studio Team Services, what are the best practices when creating team projects?
Is it one project for the enterprise? One project per actual project? One project per team?
With TFS, I've read many recommendations to use a single giant team project with multiple areas (see Why You Should use a Single (Giant) TFS Team Project. Is it different with VSTS?
We will have mixed languages with different build processes that includes C, C#, Java, Python, etc. with a multitude of outputs including desktop applications, mobile applications, NuGet libraries that are shared, C libraries that are shared, etc.
Is it different with VSTS
No
Is it one project for the enterprise? One project per actual project?
One project per team?
It depends the detail requirement, as that article says there are benefits to isolating and separating the various assets of each project/team, creating a team project for each seems like the most intuitive way to achieve this.
However, the multiple team projects can cause significant hurdles if you wish to move data across a team project boundary, there is no easy way to move data from one team project to another.
To conclude, you can refer to that article to decide the structure of team project(s).
It depends on your exact situation. Regarding structuring of projects and teams, Visual Studio Team Services is not different to TFS on-premise.
See also this response which explains differences to consider between having a single project with multiple teams versus a multiple projects: TFS setup for one small team and multiple parallel projects
We have several closely related DevOps projects each with their own jazz git repositories in our Bluemix DevOps account. Each project has its own stories/tasks/defects etc.
What is the current best method to gain a single view of the cumulative backlogs of all projects so we can have one place to prioritize items and plan sprints across all projects. If DevOps Track and Plan can not do this. Is there a 3rd party tool that can integrate with DevOps/Bluemix that will do this for us?
Not a perfect solution, but I asked a very similar question and have had success using the approach described for several projects:
How to manage multiple components with IBM Bluemix Track & Plan
This isn't a supported capability at the moment.
I've passed your question on to DevOps Services' developers. We're adding features to Bluemix and Bluemix DevOps Services all the time.