Testing for the Dynamics AX Ecosystem – An Update

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Wow… it’s 2010.  I’m way overdue for an update from my last post in May… 

The story that I laid out in that long ago post has been getting crisper, but the high level concepts have stayed essentially the same.  In early October, I had the opportunity to do another presentation at an AX”6”TAP SDR (Technology Adoption Partner Software Design Review).  The cool thing about this session is that it was done over lunch… so I had a captive audience!  A second cool thing is that I had some great support from the Visual Studio team to help tell the VS 2010 story. 

The essence of this presentation was an end-to-end walkthrough of a simple customization scenario.  The scenario involved two personas from the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Model: Simon and Viktor.  The customization was a change in Per Diem calculations in the Expense Management module.  This involved some new fields on a Table plus a change in the business logic that calculated the Per Diem allowances.

The PowerPoint slide below shows the flow of the walkthrough and a overview of the roles of Simon and Viktor in the scenario.  This is a pretty typical roles and responsibilities makeup for a Dynamics implementation partner.  In more detail…

  • Simon is a Systems Implementer / Functional Consultant.  His role in the customization scenario was to develop requirements in VS10, develop an acceptance test case using VS10, and then execute the acceptance test case after development was complete.
  • Viktor is a Business Systems Developer.  His role was to do the development of the feature that Simon defined.  In parallel with development, Viktor executed and modified a Business Logic Acceptance Test developed with the SysTest framework (see my last post for more background on Business Logic Acceptance Tests). 

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The feedback from the partners in attendance was very positive.  The VS tools show a lot of promise and are a good match for the domain expert roles like Simon.  The integration in Team Foundation Server of source code control, build, work item tracking, bug tracking, and now test case planning and management is very powerful!

I’m continuing to flesh out details of this scenario… more content coming soon.