Dave Froslie - Microsoft Development on the Prairie

Microsoft Dynamics AX Software Design Review and Knowledge Transfer

2009-05-26T23:53:08Z

I spent a week in early May at the Software Design Review (SDR) / Knowledge Transfer at our Microsoft campus in Bellevue, WA. The SDR is an opportunity for our AX development team to present and discuss release progress with the customers and partners that have been selected for the ‘AX6’ Technology Adoption Partner (TAP) program.

This is the first SDR that I’ve attended and the opportunity to mingle with customers and partners for five days is a fantastic experience. And the fact that these are some of our best customers and partners makes it even better. It even started before I arrived when I realized that I was sitting next to an attendee on the plane ride from Minneapolis to Seattle.

My formal participation in the event was a discussion on test tools for the AX ecosystem. This is something I’ve been working on for some time. The primary visible progress so far has been the white paper that we published after AX 2009 was released last year. Now we’re starting to formalize the concepts that we intend to bring forth in the AX6 timeframe and I wanted to get some feedback on the ideas.

There are two parts to the ‘story’ that I laid out for several people in the past week. I will elaborate some in this post.

The first part of the story is ‘Business Logic Acceptance Tests’. The name is very descriptive of these tests. The tests would exercise AX at the business logic layer; no user interface components would be engaged in these tests. An acceptance test is typically defined as a black box test that verifies basic functionality. These tests would be written by Microsoft and delivered to partners and customers as a regression suite. We have to do some more investigation on a couple of different approaches for developing these tests, but conceptually there should not be an issue.

The second part of the story is one that I’ve been waiting to prove out for quite some time. The AX 2009 white paper references the Rosario release of Visual Studio and the test capabilities that are in the release. In fact, we’ve been discussing this capability with the Visual Studio team for over a year and a half! We now know this release as Visual Studio 10 (VS10) and we have been using some pre-beta bits for a few months. Further, we have some prototype AX code that enables the Capture / Playback capability in VS10 to work better with AX.

The proof of concept that I demoed features the Microsoft Test Runner (code name Camano) client executing a test case with AX. Camano builds on Team Foundation Server to provide Test Case Management capability. The Test Management capability by itself is very cool, but there’s more. When a tester executes a test for the first time, Camano has the capability to record the UI actions executed. On future executions, the tester can ‘fast forward’ through the test case using the recorded UI actions. But wait, there’s more… Camano has wonderful integration with the bug tracking capability in TFS so that the “No Repro” problem is significantly mitigated.

Amit Chatterjee has been detailing the test capabilities of VS10 in his blog. There are a lot of good posts there, but check out this one for more information on Camano. With the VS10 beta coming out last week, there’s an opportunity for you to play with the bits directly.

The feedback on this two prong approach was very positive. We need to take the next steps to flesh out the concepts further and work on some pilots in the coming months. I look forward to working with others on the AX development team and the contacts made in the past week to make this approach a reality for AX6!

TFS Express?

2009-04-08T18:25:13Z

As mfp discussed in his blog post, Dynamics Ax 2009 Version Control Interview, Microsoft Dynamics AX now supports Team Foundation Server (TFS) as a source code control option. TFS is a capable tool for source code control, bug tracking, and project management. In the next release of Visual Studio (VS10), some slick testing capability is being built with TFS as the backbone. But more on that later…

The goal of this post is to point you to Microsoft MVP Doug Holland’s post, Team Foundation Server Express Edition. Doug makes the case that Microsoft should provide an 'Express’ version of TFS, ala SQL Server Express. The gist is that it would be very beneficial to have a lightweight version of TFS available for client installation.

If you are a Dynamics AX ISV or implementation partner who frequently works independently on small projects, I think this could be very beneficial. There’s also a Work Group version of TFS that supports up to 5 users. TFS will provide a strong foundation for engineering excellence for you and your team.

If this sounds interesting to you, Doug has provided an opportunity for you to provide to Microsoft. You can vote on this suggestion and/or provide a suggestion or comment via Microsoft Connect Feedback Item 430891. Please take the time to do this as I know Microsoft development teams take this input very seriously.

Windows Management on Win 7

2009-01-23T21:48:48Z

It’s been a few days since I installed Windows 7 in my laptop. I now have installed SQL 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and Dynamics AX 2009 and I am still very pleased with the new operating system.

One of the coolest features is one the most basic features in a graphical user interface – windows management. I’m someone who tends to accumulate windows and applications over the course of a day, ultimately ending up with 15-20 windows or more sitting around on my desktop. Enabling ways to better manage my PC activities is a welcome improvement.

The Task Bar is still there, but its functionality has changed quite a bit. The screenshot above is a picture of my dual monitor setup. The popup shown on the bottom of the left screen is what I see when I hover over one of the applications that I’ve launched. In this case, it is Dynamics AX 2009 with three active windows.

First of all, it’s great to be able to see and select an image of what windows I have active without displaying them. But it gets better. There’s a little red ‘x’ on the upper right hand corner of each image enabling me to close the window right there – great for cleaning up all of those windows that I accumulate. Further, if you hover your mouse over one of the images, all windows on my desktop minimize except for the window represented by the image. In the screenshot above, I am hovering over image for the main window for Dynamics AX and you can see it on the right monitor.

While most of the above was obvious after I played around for a while, I also learned some more cool things after reading Tim Sneath’s blog post “The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets”. Take a look at some of the short cuts in this post. My personal favorite short cut is Windows+Shift+Left/Right. This moves the window between my two monitors. Since I work with a 12.1” laptop monitor on the left and a 22” LCD monitor on the right, my primary workspace is the LCD monitor. Being able to move a document or application from secondary to primary workspace quickly is very handy.

There are other windows management and task bar features that I like, but I’ll stop here for this post. But I will say this – the SDI (Single Document Interface) capability of Dynamics AX 2009 will shine with the new windows management features in Windows 7!

Windows 7!

2009-01-20T23:55:30Z

I had an all day meeting cancelled at the last minute today. It was just the opportunity that I was looking for to get on with a project that I’ve been wanting to do.

My two year old Toshiba M400 laptop has been feeling a bit sluggish lately. It was due to be ‘refreshed’ and I figured the time was right to try out a test version of Windows 7.

I spent some time this morning getting things backed up and was ready to go… only thing was that I was getting a little risk adverse. I needed to leave in about 3 hours and I need my laptop this evening for some work from home. Hmm… ultimately I decided to go ahead and give it a try since the prep work was done.

Our internal IT has it set up to install a new OS via a network boot, so I selected the Windows 7 and Office 14 install. I answered a couple of questions, provided my network credentials, and off went the install. An hour or so later, I was presented a log-in screen for Windows 7!

This is frequently where the work begins – finding drivers, making sure the basics still work, etc. But there wasn’t any of this. I logged in, launched Outlook, and the basics were in place. I pulled my backed up files across and installed my XM radio gadget. My basic ‘office machine’ was back in place in under two hours, complete with music – very cool!

To be honest, I haven’t been paying much attention to Windows 7, but I like what I see so far. There are some nice usability improvements, it seems to be very compact based on hard drive usage, and performance has been good. It will be interesting to see how this version will handle some of the development tools that I will install later – SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, AX?

I just ordered a laptop for home use last night and am debating about putting Windows 7 on that when it arrives. Is Windows 7 ready for family use? We have an old laptop running XP today, so we could possibly leap frog the Vista era at home. I guess I’ll have a few days on this to get a feel for it.

In the spirit of moving to current technology, I’m writing this with Windows Live Writer. I’ve historically used Word for blog posts, but Live Writer can handle pictures and other formatting better. So far, so good with Live Writer as well. You’ll know it worked if you’re reading this post…

Winter at Microsoft

2008-12-29T18:31:55Z

We've had a pretty serious start to winter here in the Upper Midwest. The last that I heard we had reached 24" of snow for the month of December. With a couple days left and a couple more fronts planned to come through, there's a good chance that we break the record for the most snowfall ever in the month. It seems that every other day brings a new Weather Advisory, followed by me, my snow shovel, and my snow blower spending some quality time in the driveway.

My friends in Redmond also are off to a pretty serious start to their winter. I don't have all the data, but I know they closed schools for multiple days before Christmas (we've had one 'storm day') and the roads have been treacherous. I'm sure they haven't had the amount of snow or cold that we have, but the ice, hills, and lack of facilities to deal with it more than match our challenges.

In its post, Microsoft's Fargo campus mocks Redmond's Snow, The Microsoft Blog had an excerpt from an entertaining statement that someone from Microsoft Fargo had written regarding Microsoft services "impacted" by the winter weather. While the statement is humorous, I think the dozens of comments responding to the post are even more entertaining…

Now I should get some work done before the next round of shoveling…

White Paper – Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Testing Guidance for ISVs

2008-12-01T22:34:42Z

There's a new white paper available on MSDN which provides testing guidance for Microsoft Dynamics AX ISVs. Also available is a simple Excel based template for test case management and a sample test case created using the Task Recorder feature in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. All three of these can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec0c1650-ef44-45e9-ade9-57f28c39a051&DisplayLang=en.

I was responsible for most of the content in the paper, so please provide any feedback that you have to me. There's a large demand for testing guidance in the Dynamics ecosystem. This document is a start, but I know there is more work to do. I would love to hear some feedback on this document and what else you would like to see from Microsoft in this area.

Have you made a Developer better today?

2008-07-25T15:17:58Z

James Whittaker is one of the most distinguished testers at Microsoft. He's written a couple of books and is a well known in the industry for his work in testing – particularly in the Security field (see this interview). James is now the Architect for Visual Studio Team System – Test Edition. And he's started blogging in the past month – check out JW on Test!

One of his posts, measuring testers, caught my eye. One of the things that I like to think about when considering performance is how much better a tester has made the product. A tester can make the product better in a variety of ways. Finding bugs in code before we ship is an obvious way and one that is easily measurable. Another thing that is fairly measurable is the quantity and quality of the regression automation that a tester writes to help us avoid bugs in existing code. Those are good ways to make the product better, but even better is the impact a tester has in the functional spec and design phases of a feature. Helping to build the right feature in the right way the first time has a much bigger impact on the product, but is also much more difficult to measure.

James' post throws another dimension to this evaluation. James' advice on evaluating testers is to 'measure how much better a tester has made the developers on the team'. What I like about this is that it is more sustainable than any of the things that I mention in the previous paragraph. Making lasting improvements through improved development practices (individual and team wide) on the team is a great thing to consider. How a tester is impacting the product in the short term is also obviously important, and I don't think a tester should come to work with an attitude of "I'm going to make my developer peer better today whether he wants to or not!" But improved developers and practices is a logical side effect to great testing.

An even better way to improve developers is for them to be a tester! Some of the best developers that I've worked with are also some of the best testers that I've worked with – whether or not they have formally been in a test role or not. I especially like a developer career path that includes a tour in the test group.

James has gotten off to a fast start on his blog – check it out!

Unit Testing in Dynamics Ax

2008-02-21T02:35:46Z

As I mentioned in my previous post, Dynamics AX has an integrated development environment and a specialized language called X++. Inspired by the usefulness of 'xUnit' based frameworks like JUnit and NUnit, the developers for Dynamics AX 4.0 (released in 2006) implemented a unit testing framework called SysTest in the AX development environment. With this framework, AX developers can easily write unit tests for their X++ implementations – even following a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach if desired.

The purpose of this post is to bring together some resources for learning more about SysTest. Here they are:

Overviews:
- Chapter 16 of Inside Dynamics AX 4.0
- Michael Fruergaard Pontoppidan's Channel 9 video – Unit Test Framework in Dynamics AX 4.0
- Unit Test Framework article at MDSN's Microsoft Dynamics AX Developer Center
More detailed information:
- David Pokluda's blog – David was one of the original creators of SysTest and he has a series of posts on the framework.

What is Dynamics Ax?

2008-02-21T02:02:56Z

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am now working on the Microsoft Dynamics Ax product team. I plan to start posting on topics closely related to the product and felt an upfront post with a brief product overview and some context would be helpful.

Like many Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products, Dynamics Ax has an integrated development environment for rapid application development. The environment is metadata driven and contains a specialized language called X++. Nowadays, we would call X++ and supporting metadata a Domain Specific Language, or DSL.

Microsoft delivers base business application functionality and a large network of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Implementation Partners customize the application for specific customer needs. Since my previous job as a Development Lead was focused on customization, I have a great deal of interest in helping to make Ax ISVs and Partners successful.

One thing that has come through loud and clear for me in my current role as a test manager is that ERP systems are very challenging to test. First of all, their functionality is very broad. Second, there is a variety of deployment configurations that need to be considered. Third, non functional requirements like security, performance, and extensibility are paramount. Fourth, upgrade is very important since businesses can't just start over when installing a new system.

The four items listed in the previous paragraph is a starter list for what we need to worry about for the base application that we ship from Microsoft. On top of this, there is the likely possibility of ISV add-ons followed by implementation customization that tailors the product for a particular company's business needs.

One way to integrate my interest in the partner ecosystem with my current role in software test is to focus on how Microsoft can enable partners to deliver quality solutions to our mutual customers. This is something that I am focused on in addition to my internally focused responsibilities. Much of what I plan to post in the coming weeks will be related to enabling quality in the Ax ecosystem. Look for more soon…

MSDN Tester Center

2007-12-26T18:45:54Z

Check out the MSDN Tester Center for helpful information for software testers and the software testing discipline! The material includes whiteboard videos, blogs, technical articles, book reviews, and a variety of other resources.

Automated testing or manual testing?

2007-12-03T22:49:01Z

One of the great debates in the Software Test Engineering world involves the optimal mix of automated testing and manual testing. Like all good debates in software engineering, there are the religious fanatics that position themselves at either end of the argument. In pretty much all cases that I've seen, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. This debate is another one where that is the case.

In his recent article in Better Software, Jonathon Kohl does a nice job of showing how automated and manual testing can be very complementary. Check out his blog post on the topic. The post contains a link to the article.

One year as a Test Manager

2007-12-03T22:40:24Z

I moved into this Test Manager gig a little over a year ago. I also stopped posting consistently to this blog about that time. Coincidence? I think not…

Another event that happened in the past year is that my team was re-org'd into the Microsoft Dynamics Ax product group. This happened last spring and we joined in the midst of the 5.0 release cycle. We immediately picked up some critical features for the release. Needless to say, it's been rather hectic.

I've learned a lot about both the testing discipline and Ax in the past few months. Those two topics, especially where they overlap, is what I want to start blogging about in the next few months. As before, I also intend to sprinkle in some Fargo related topics.

The challenge is finding the time to do it, but this post is the first step!

I.M. Wright Goes Public

2007-10-01T18:15:56Z

Since joining Microsoft almost six years ago, I have enjoyed the columns written by I.M. Wright. I.M. is the alter ego of our Director of Development Excellence, Eric Brechner. His columns always bring a smile to my face while drilling home a key point in development process.

Eric has recently written a book (I. M. Wright's Hard Code (Best Practices)) and I just realized that he is now posting his columns outside the firewall at http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_brechner/default.aspx. Take a look…

Fargo is #1 in Great Cities for Job Seekers List

2007-01-17T05:01:55Z

A co-worker pointed out this article from the MSN Careers site. Fargo was rated #1 in a list of "15 Great Cities for Job Seekers".

When are you going to check it out? We have openings on our team for Software Developers…

Conway’s Law and Agile Projects

2007-01-02T15:09:00Z

Conway's Law states that "Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. " Further, Conway's Law is identified as a key pattern in Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development, stating "Make sure that the organization is compatible with the product architecture". Finally, the relationship between architecture and organization is the key component of the Architecture Business Cycle described in Software Architecture in Practice.

I first came across these ideas several years ago when I was working in another organization. The idea that architecture would influence organization was pretty intuitive to me. The corollary that organization would influence the architecture was not as intuitive. As a matter of fact, it seemed flat out wrong to me. The way that a company is organized shouldn't influence a technical matter as core as a product's architecture.

But then I thought about how we made decisions on the product that I was working on. The product was built on a 'platform' built by another team. The platform released about once a year. The product that I was working on was delivered as a standard package and was used for custom applications, often releasing more than once a year. How we met feature needs for both standard and custom deliveries depended on what we could get from the platform team and when we could get it. If the feature was important and we couldn't get it into the platform due to either priority or timing considerations, then we figured out how to build it within my team's code base. Our organization was driving the technical decisions!

Does Conway's Law still apply when using agile practices? I believe it does - especially for larger product teams like we see at Microsoft. But there is definitely an added degree of coordination in order to meet the agile goal of building a system incrementally where the focus is on end to end scenarios that provide customer value. It can be very difficult to accomplish a scenario within a single iteration if it involves significant development efforts in multiple teams. But enabling the scenario in as short a timeframe as possible is still the goal.

An alternative to Conway's Law would be to iteratively organize around the end to end scenarios. The danger here is that the architecture grows in an ad hoc manner as many different teams and individuals will be mucking in different areas of the system. For example, how would you grow the data access layer functional in a way that architectural integrity would be preserved? I also think that release planning would be difficult from a resource perspective.

So Conway's Law still applies as a best practice for me, even for agile projects. But I would be very interested to hear about its application on agile projects as well as alternatives for organizing large projects that want to be As Agile As Possible.