Integrating Processes into Team System

Once you have customized the process template to your liking, you must reimport it into Team Foundation Server to share it with the rest of the project team members. A project manager can share your custom process by creating a new project using your process. You must, of course, also verify that the process has been imported successfully. Here are the steps to import a custom process template into Team Foundation Server:

1. Select Process Template Manager by clicking Team Foundation Server Settings within the Team menu. The Process Template Manager displays all current available processes.

2. Click the Upload button and select your process template description file (ProcessTemplate.xml) using the Upload Process Template dialog box.

3. As soon as you click Open, the process template imports into Team Foundation Server and appears on the list of available processes.

4. Close the Process Template Manager.

Deleting Process Templates

Sometimes, process templates are no longer needed because they have been replaced by newer versions or they have become obsolete. We strongly recommend that you export a copy of the process template you want to delete as a backup before you take the steps to delete it. To delete a process template, simply follow these steps:

1. Choose the Process Template Manager by selecting Team Foundation Server Settings from the Team menu. You then see a list of all the available process templates.

2. Pick a process template to delete and select Delete.

According to the Visual Studio 2005 SDK documentation, deleting a process template will not affect team projects that were created using the template. This is because a copy of all the artifacts from the process template (documents, source code repository, permissions) have been created on the server and the project is no longer tied to the template file. You can then change the default template by selecting a process and clicking the Make Default button. You can then close the Process Template Manager.

Testing Your Custom Process Template

There are two primary types of tests you would want to undertake with your custom process templates. The first kind is feature (or requirements) testing to determine whether all the customized features are available within your new template. The second type of testing you would want to undertake is usability testing: Will the feature break in certain circumstances? Does everything work as it should?

The most important guideline we can provide when editing process templates is to make small incremental changes and test your templates continuously. From this perspective, the process consists of making a minor change to the template, uploading the template to a nonproduction Team Foundation Server, creating a new team project using the template, testing your change, and starting all over again. Creating a process template this way is admittedly long and tedious, but will guarantee fantastic results in the end.

If you want to simply test and implement custom work items, you can use the WITIMPORT and WITEXPORT tools to modify work items in an existing project. The important advantage is that you don't have to create a brand new team project every time you want to test and deploy a custom work item. You can learn more about these tools on MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253088.aspx.

Another important recommendation we can make is to create and test your process templates in a test environment before porting them over to a production environment.