Month: August 2015

Part 8: Dynamics NAV 2016: Engineering

So not one for end users but they will get the benefit all the same. Microsoft with the Dynamics NAV 2016 release are making available their entire test suite to anyone who wants to use it. Why is that significant? Well you have to understand the difference these test suites have made to Microsoft’s development quality and cycles to understand its potential benefit to both partners and end users.

Dynamics-nav-2016-engineering

The test suite consists of over 17,000 individual tests that can be run against A Dynamics NAV system to see what fails. When Microsoft do any addition or changes to NAV they then run these tests and make sure that, bluntly, they haven’t broken anything. The test create a set of data, tune the process and then check the result. This ensures that the software still does what it should do and that there are no unintended consequences of anything they’ve changed.

Creating these 17,000 tests was no small task, it’s literally thousands of hours or development just for the tests. The last two or three years you’ve seen the results though as its enabled Microsoft to release a new version every year with a quality not seen previously. Even more impressively those of us on the insiders programme get a new version every couple of weeks as they simply write the code, run these tests and so ensure it’s a valid functioning set with minimal effort.

So releasing the tests to the rest of us will make us just as efficient will it? Well yes and no. That’s because writing tests takes quite a bit of time and effort. Is it viable to write one for specific client developments? Probably not as I doubt the at least 50% cost increase will be hard to justify.

Where it will pay off though should be with add-on solutions. Any vendor that doesn’t make this investment for software that they are trying to sell multiple times is treating their customers as guinea pigs. I suggested as a recent panel that tests should have to be submitted as part of the Certified for Microsoft Dynamics certification and I really hope that suggestion is taken up.

Note

This post is part of a 9-part series. A link to all the posts in this series are below (updated as published);