Based on our recent experiences and the current covid situation it was decided, in close collaboration with our clients, to spread week 4 over two weeks:

• week 4a reporting and test automation
• week 4b data exchange, data upgrade and SQL matters

Both weeks be only with morning teaching and afternoon assignments giving the students more time to dive into the subjects.

With this change in the course setup, the junior developers and their trainer Luc van Vugt met again and online for week 4a on Monday November 15, 2021.

technical track

In between the previous course week and the current one the students had been working on a business case which code had been delivered on a mutually agreed upon deadline and was reviewed by their trainer. Week 4a started with a short recap of the case and a discussion of the most common issues arisen from the review. Based on this review and discussion each student had to write a retrospect of the project himself answering questions like:

• How did you go about with the planning?
• Did you take into account the work others involved?
• Could you recollect things learned and discussed that you needed to apply?
• What did you finish and could have been delivered?
• (Feeling) Lone wolf or team member?
• How did you involve your stakeholder(s)?
• How did you go about getting clarification on various matters/details?
• What “shit hit the van” and how/when did you inform stakeholder(s)?

Next to this a checklist needed to be created that will be of help in any next project preventing similar errors

After this recap and discussion the group got to dive into the first new topic of this week: reports. During two and a halve days the students got introduced to and to work with reports in Business Central, both printable – RDLC and WORD – and processing only. Even though in the basis a fairly easy to understand topic it’s always a challenge to grasp all this nuts and bolts that it entails. The second part of this week was spent on test automation, the trainer’s favorite subject as you might know. The basic concepts of testing and test automation were discussed and based on this the students got to implement their first automated tests in Business Central. First supported by well detailed exercises and later leaving more room for the students to perform their newly learned skills. It was interesting to see how the student went about working on this.

what’s next

The group well meet on-line again for week 4b on December 13, 2020, to continue with data exchange, upgrade, and SQL matters finalizing our road to the the last project in week 5.