Ask HN: Ever migrated to a new source code, CI/CD, or project management system?

#1

Post by rsaur » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

On my engineering team (~50 engineers, ~6 year old codebase), we're planning to migrate all of the above to a new service, and I wanted to hear from other people about the experience of going through a big workflow migration in general.

Do you have any horror stories (or happy stories)? Regrets? Pitfalls? Advice? Resources?

Did you face resistance from outside of engineering, or resistance from engineers? Did you go through with the migration, and if so, was everyone happier later on?

Re: Ask HN: Ever migrated to a new source code, CI/CD, or project management system?

#2

Post by CM30 » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

Well, at one job we originally used SVN with Eclipse as our main editor, then moved to Git via GitLab. However, there weren't really any horror stories, since we basically decided that we weren't gonna migrate existing projects for the time being, and merely made sure future ones used the new system. Didn't hear many complaints from the devs either.

Re: Ask HN: Ever migrated to a new source code, CI/CD, or project management system?

#3

Post by shoo » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

make sure the new service works before forcing everyone onto it, ideally be able to run both old and new in parallel while proving the new service works as intended; after cutting over to new service leave the old service up in read only mode until such time as everyone is comfortable turning it off. backups.

if one or more of the new services needs to be up in order to ship (planned / emergency patch) releases, think through if it is acceptable to not be able to ship releases for some time & plan accordingly.

I've seen migrations happen properly for version control and CI, with everything being completely moved off the old systems.

If your current pipeline has lots of integration (e.g. notifications from version control to issue trackers, build processes that update wikis, etc) all of that stuff will need to be discovered, deleted or ported.

larger enterprise orgs (500+ engineers, say) always seem to be migrating between these services. If you switch companies you'll find people migrating from A to B when your last team just did a B to A migration.