Software Development Quality Assurance in AX

It's been over a year and a half since my last post, but I'm turning the ship towards a new course: Software Quality. During the hiatus, I've been working on multiple projects simultaneously which has taken me away from the day-to-day habits I used to engage like blogging on AX. My workload increased due to attrition and the economic situations not allowing those individuals to be replaced.

As can be surmised, the more work I take on the more my quality has dipped. This is not as a result of my work ethic but rather the need to compact three full-time equivalents' jobs into a single full-time equivalent's day plus a few hours. Although the quality issues have been extremely minor and have resulted in no downtime, I still feel that zero quality issues are needed in all circumstances.

To illustrate the dynamic nature of the position I have grown into (and many other Dynamics AX developers are facing), in the short time since I started writing this entry this morning, I have already had the following requests:

• Researching a Windows 7 64-bit driver for a USB WiMax adapter
• Reset an AD password
• Clear out space on a linux server drive that had become full
• Get the application back up and running that failed on the linux server as a result of the out of disk space issue
• Have our corporate nagios administrator setup an alert to ensure we are notified when the drive becomes 80% full

As you know, AX development is the majority of my job, but as you can see, systems administrator is now a part-time position for me.

With all that being said, the subject of this blog is changing to focus on helping the small-shop AX developer, who has other duties besides development, move towards having a very low error injection rate into the AX code they deploy.

David Bowles