Skip to main content

AX and Scrum: Product development (ISV)

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, it allows you to focus on what you (team) have committed to.

How scrum works?

Below is a high level diagram showing how Srcum works.

scrumLifecycle

  • One product owner priorities the product backlog (think of these as functional requirements, development requirements etc)
  • The sprint team (developers/functional consultants/testers etc) decides each sprint (2 weeks to weeks) how much work they can do by picking items from the top of the product back log (highest priority)
  • Sprint starts
  • Cycle through the sprint making sure all the stories are done. The team has committed to this so they better be sure they can finish it it.
  • Sprint ends at the fix allocated time. When you can ship the product (in AX terms you can release a fully working/tested model).

The scrum masters job is to facilitate the team and make sure everyone is following the scrum framework. Removing any impediments. Making sure the team communicates.

Enough of the intro for today. Next time I will get into the some real examples.

  • How we manage our development environments
  • Product back log
  • Task board – Visual board to see the progress of each task
  • Sprint burn down – how to see remaining work in a single graph
  • Example story and the tasks

Extra reading:

Great video in under 10minutes you get to understand what scrum is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU0llRltyFM

Must read scrum guide. http://www.scrumguides.org/

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

AX - How to use Map and MapEnumerator

Similar to Set class, Map class allows you to associate one value (the key) with another value. Both the key and value can be any valid X++ type, including objects. The types of the key and the value are specified in the declaration of the map. The way in which maps are implemented means that access to the values is very fast. Below is a sample code that sets and retrieves values from a map. static void checkItemNameAliasDuplicate(Args _args) { inventTable inventTable; Map map; MapEnumerator mapEnumerator; NameAlias nameAlias; int counter = 0; ; map = new Map(Types::String, Types::Integer); //store into map while select inventTable { nameAlias = inventTable.NameAlias; if (!map.exists(nameAlias)) { map.insert(nameAlias, 1); } else { map.insert(nameAlias, map.lookup(nameAlias) + 1); } } //retrieve fro...
Read more

AX - How to use Set and SetEnumerator

The Set class is used for the storage and retrieval of data from a collection in which the values of the elements contained are unique and serve as the key values according to which the data is automatically ordered. You can create a set of primitive data types or complex data types such as a Class, Record or Container. Below is sample of a set of records. static void _Set(Args _args) {     CustTable       custTable;     Set             set = new Set(Types::Record);     SetEnumerator   setEnumerator;     ;     while select custTable     {         if (custTable && !set.in(custTable))         {             set.add(custTable);         }     }     if (!set.empty())     {    ...
Read more

Approve Workflow via email using template placeholders #Dyn365FO

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has placeholders which can be inserted into the instructions. Normally you would want this to show up in the email that is sent. One of the most useful ones is the URL link to the exact record that you are approving. In the workflow configurations use the placeholder and build up your message. Towards the end it has workflow specific ones. The URL token is %Workflow.Link to web% . For the technical people the token is replaced in this class WorkflowDocumentField. This is what I inserted into my email template. <BODY> subject: %subject% <BR> message: %message% <BR> company: %company% <BR> for: %for% <BR> </BODY> Should look like this. The final result looks like this. If you debug these are the place holders that are put together.
Read more