Implement Agile process over legacy system for integrated software development lifecycle management

Our customer provides an end-to-end Enterprise Business Management solution for medium to large law firms and professional services organizations. 80% of 200 law firms use our customer’s solutions to operate their businesses efficient

REQUIREMENTS

Our customer has several concurrent development projects, across their global offices, ranging from legacy client-server applications to the best-of-breed enterprise web-applications. The only common thread for all these projects was that they used Visual Studio for code development, not necessarily the same versions. They used different systems for source control and versioning (SourceSafe and StarTeam), project management (MS Project), document management (SharePoint and Wikis), issue-tracking (Pivotal, and StarTeam) and CRM (Pivotal and CRM On-Demand) that did not integrate well with each other and created bottlenecks for release management and customer support.

It was decided to unify all these applications on Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server to leverage its end-to-end application lifecycle management capabilities and reduce the number of systems to two – TFS and CRMOD. However, the project was complex given different processes, technology platforms and maintenance needs of their various products.

PROCESS

As we had helped develop several of the software products, we were acutely aware of the differences, that had the potential to derail the rollout of TFS. We worked closely with the different departments to establish a baseline for TFS collections, templates and forms and customization processes to enable product specific needs, in their own collections. Once the strategy approval was achieved, we started to prepare multiple tools to migrate and integrate different systems into TFS and CRMOD. We had made Source Migration tool to migrate Source/Code with history from StarTeam and VSS to TFS. We had made CR migration tool to migrate Change Request with history from StarTeam to TFS WorkItems. We had made CRMOD Sync tool to integrate TFS into CRMOD. After preparing these tools, we had done some staging migrations, so our tools were repeatedly tested to ensure that final migration would be problem-free.

Result

With the established project plan, we were able to accomplish the following milestones:

Configured and tested the TFS multi-tier environment.
Planned, organized, and executed the migration of product-based source control with full revision histories and issue management to corresponding TFS Collections.
Automated build processes for developer initiated incremental builds and QA initiated full-release builds.
Expanded the build automation processes to include integration and smoke tests with accurate reports.
Integrated CRMOD with TFS to provide full visibility of bugfix schedules and release to the customer support organization.
We were assigned the project to administer, manage and improve the TFS farm in the long term.