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I have posted previously on AX and Scrum this is just a continuation of my series. This post shall cover what a story is. A user story is a short description of what is needed. The main purpose of this is to be able to estimate the piece of work. Below is an actual story i have worked on. We could (should) have written this different. In scrum they teach you to write it in the perspective of the actor. For example: “As a work order user, I would like to create a work order and submit it to workflow. I would like to get alerts and notifications.” One thing we like to do in our team is set up Acceptance criteria's (those AC1 2 AC5 that you see in the screenshot). At the end of the day we use it to tell us a story is done. The next step for use once we have given it sized the story and accepted it into a sprint. We start putting some finer details. We break down the task. Our comment tasks that we use and to use to indicate a story is done are: Functional design – Doesn’t ha...

Scrum highly encourages you to do automated testing. A common thing I hear is “any (some) automated testing is better than none”. So, my advice is start somewhere. I am not going to go through all the detail of automated testing that we do but what I will cover is the Unit test framework . The unit test framework is in the MorphX IDE that allows you test your code. A click of a button you could run a whole bunch of automated tests. Below is a screen shot of an area we test heavily, our forecasting engine. The forecasting engine similar to master planning in standard AX. It recommends what work order should be done and when. eg. Every 100KM a service is required for your car. Or Every 6Month you do an oil change. Or on the 1st of of every month you do an inspection. All sorts of combinations. . Below is a simple test for testing calendar days. We document our test cases in a spreadsheet first. Writing what the input is and what the out come is. Then a developer writes a test suite o...

I am going to talk about the task board today. A task board is used to keep track of our progress. On a daily basis we update how many hours we have remaining. Each swim lane shows the status of the task. Below is an example of my task board. This sprint below I was working on work order workflow. Each day on our daily scrum meeting we update the board on how many hours remaining for each task. On this board it is clear who has accepted the work. How many hours they have left and if the task is done. Multiple people can work on the same task.

Scrum encourages version control. Below is the setup we have. Our development environment is local to all developers. When a unit of work is complete and meets best practice it is checked in. Then on a regular basis the Test environment will be updated using the TFS synchronise functionality. This should update the test environment will all checked in work. This diagram below illustrates this process. We have 3 environments for product development: Environment name AOS Comment Daxeam_Dev Developer machine Install on developers machine and TFS is enabled. Daxeam_Test AX6-AOS-TEST Installed on the server and TFS is enabled. When a developer is finished with a piece of functionality it is synced into this environment for testing. Ideally a nightly build is recommended to ensure that everything is fine and it can be picked at as soon as a problem occurs. We actually do this on the last 5 days of our sprint- every night. Daxeam_Release AX6-AOS-RELEASE Thi...

Being recently certified as a scrum master through scrum alliance http://www.scrumalliance.org/ . I thought I would share some experiences through this blog. Last week I wrote about what I was working on for the last 2 years ( Daxeam – Enterprise asset management solution for Dynamics AX). Continuing with the spirit of sharing. I will try to post how we are building our product and provide some examples. Our development methodology of choice is Scrum. What is scrum? “An agile framework that allows us to focus on delivering the highest business value in the shortest time.” Mike Cohn – “Introduction to Scrum Methodology” It is an incremental and iterative approach to development. Why scrum? The biggest advantage of scrum for me is that it allows the team to deliver the highest business value first. Then on top of that each sprint release is a potentially shippable product. Yes – in AX any mod is shippable but what scrum does is it formalize this for. Rather than being reactive,...

Today I will talk about something I am passionate about and have been working on for the last 2 years. This is Daxeam . The name Daxeam is a mash up of two words. DAX  for Dynamics AX and EAM for Enterprise asset management . It is a maintenance solution built from the ground up on AX 2012. Which means we took full advantage of new tools and right way of developing. It is Certified for Dynamics AX. You can find more detail on pinpoint and the Daxeam website. http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-au/applications/daxeam-asset-maintenance-for-microsoft-dynamics-ax-users-4295032381 Daxeam revolves around: asset and keeping track of assets. Cost, meters, structures etc work orders – budgeting hours and items. Capturing feedback. Workflow. forecasting, scheduling and planning – Preventative maintenance. Detailed scheduling with capacity. warranty and permits – triggers for warranties … Why am I writing this today you may ask? I am planning on blogging a little bit every week abo...