How to upgrade a Team project to use the Inheritance model

Question

We are using Azure Devops Server 2020 and have a project using the XML process model. The project belongs to an old collection which do not support the Inheritance model. When reading the article below I get the feeling it's possible to upgrade to use the Inheritance model. But my options in the administration UI are not the same as in the article. I guess it's because the collection itself does not support the inheritance model. Therefore I have created a new collection which supports the Inheritance model and wonder if there is a way to move my project to the new collection? Or is there any other way to upgrade my project to use the Inheritance model? The UI for the new collection does by the way look like the UI in the article.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/settings/work/upgrade-hosted-to-inherited?view=azure-devops

Answer 1

I am afraid that this feature: Clone a Hosted XML process to an Inheritance process cannot be implemented in azure devops server.

According to the doc, this feature only exists in the Azure Devops Service. When you select azure devops server 2020 in the drop-down box in the upper left corner, you can directly see that it is not supported.

Here is a suggestion ticket about this feature. Our product group has decided not to implement this feature on azure devops server.

For those customers who wish to go to Inherited, you have the following choices.

1. Move to the Azure DevOps Service

2. Create a new inherited collection and continue your project work within that collection

On the other hand, you cannot directly move the team project to Inheritance Process Collection.

Azure Devops also does not support the movement of team projects between collections.

Here is a suggestion ticket about this feature: make it possible to move a Team Project between Team Project Collections

So if you want to create a new inherited collection and continue your project work within that collection, you could try to use the third party tools to migrate content of the project to new collection. For example:

Migration Tools for Azure DevOps

WIMigrator

This can get complicated. But you could refer to this ticket:

Currently there is no way to convert from XML to inherited on Azure DevOps Server (on-prem). Or next step is going to be able to allow mixed mode collections. Then figure out the right migration path from XML to Inherited. We are expecting to have mixed mode available some time on the Azure DevOps Server 2020 release. Probably update 1 or 2.

It seems that the mixed mode process can meet your needs. But this function has not yet been implemented，you may still need to wait for the implementation of this feature.