Upgraded team project: adding Epic work item type

1
votes

I have a TFS2015 server upgraded from TFS2013.5. The existing team projects were created using the old template MSF For Agile 2013.x.

For these team projects I would like to enable also the Epic work item type.

According with http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tfssetup/archive/2015/09/16/configuring-the-epics-for-upgraded-team-projects-in-team-foundation-server-tfs-2015.aspx I should download the latest Agile template and import the Epic work item type.

The import of Epic type is failling with the below message:

Error importing work item type definition:

The 'refname' attribute is not declared.

So I created a new team project using the Agile template, exported the Epic work item type and compared with Epic work item type resulted from the download operation.

It seems that the differences between these two types are quite notable:

<WORKITEMTYPE name="Epic">
vs
<WORKITEMTYPE name="Epic" refname="Microsoft.VSTS.WorkItemTypes.Epic">

missing:

<FIELD name="Iteration ID" refname="System.IterationId" type="Integer" />
<FIELD name="External Link Count" refname="System.ExternalLinkCount" type="Integer" />

and so on.

Do you know why are those differences present?

1
tfstfs-2015

1 Answers

1
votes

The process template that you download from VSO is already prepared for Process Customization and contains extra information that an on-prem server doesn't understand yet.

In your case, you can simply remove the "refname=Microsoft.VSTS.WorkItemTypes.Epic" piece from the file and import it. The fields that you list out are system fields (they start with System.*) and they will always be added to all WIT definitions. They don't have to be part of the xml file that you import.