Many of us have been big fans of Bugzilla and have been using it to track bugs for many years. Bugzilla was a great web based tool and helped immensely in managing defects found by the testing team.
Though Bugzilla was great for bug tracking, it offered very little help in the other aspects of the software development. One of the options was to include multiple additional tools that covered one or more aspects in the software development or adopt an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that offered integrated tools for end-to-end solution covering every aspect within the software development cycle.
One of the ALM tool that is rapidly gaining popularity has been the Microsoft Team Foundation Server TFS). This ALM tool provides for end-to-end capabilities covering everything from gathering requirements to the final deployments of the developed applications. Since many of the mundane activities that take time and efforts during the software development cycle can be completely automated, more organizations are moving towards adopting the TFS.
One of the major challenges faced by organizations while planning for an integrated ALM solution moving away from the discrete multi-vendor tools would be the consolidation of the project artefacts like source code, defects, and documentation in the new tool. Though Microsoft and other third-party vendors have built a few tools to migrate some of the artefacts with revision history, there has been no tools for migrating the defect information with full revision history from Bugzilla to TFS, at least until now. Manually migrating the defects from Bugzilla with the revision history, transitions, attachments and other information is next to impossible.
The Bugzilla Migrator tool built by Canarys is designed to help in migrating the defects with the complete revision history from Bugzilla to the TFS 2013. This tool seamlessly migrates the states, transitions and field values from Bugzilla to TFS while managing the user mappings given the differences in the authentication schemes of Bugzilla and TFS. Once the migration has been completed, the team can seamlessly move to TFS 2013 and continue from there.
This blog series will take you through the step-by-step process of migrating the defect information from Bugzilla to TFS 2013. This migrator tool works on all versions of Bugzilla but currently tested to migrate to TFS 2013. The backend database of Bugzilla is assumed to be MySQL and the Migrator Tool does not currently work on PostgreSQL.