Report your bugs, free-riders!

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the fastest innovation and most agile business software in the world. A very feature rich solution with a packed very fast moving roadmap. We see new possibilities and features coming monthly in platform update, fall/spring releases. if you look at the entire platform-stack including windows, office, and platform (power* apps) new features being made available on a daily basis. Being first and fast have changed and challenged the Dynamics 365 ecosystem. Mostly for the good.

But we have to recognize that it is people (and highly productive) behind this innovation tsunami. In such an environment there are thousands of elements that must to fit together. If you look towards the number of combinations on how you can use and setup Dynamics 365, I would assume that this is millions of combinations in the core product. And when adding office and power* apps, combinations just increases exponentially.

People are people, and there is a limitation to the numbers of combinations that can be tested, both from a manual and automated testing scenario. This leads to scenarios that there is no capacity to test everything before the product is released. It is not possible to test all of the millions of combinations, and I know that even Microsoft do not have unlimited people and resources to cover every test scenario.

This evidently results in issues and bugs that will be found when implementing Dynamics 365, and these needs to be reported to Microsoft support so that the fixes becomes part of the future solution.

Searching, testing, reporting a solution takes time and do cost money! Each time I find a bug, I report this to Microsoft so that all of the community can benefit of a fix. But as some have recognized that reporting issues/bug is requiring effort and resources. You report the bug, analyze the issue, report the issue, Microsoft provides hotfixes, the hotfix needs to be validated and testing and then deployed to the environment. This takes time, but is necessary!

With this blog post I urge both partners and customers to report your findings to Microsoft, so that all the rest of us can benefit that we are an ecosystem together. As I hope most of you know, we are quickly moving towards Dynamics 10, that is often referred to as the “ever-green” solution. This means that there are ONE version, that all customers are using, and that follows the Microsoft roadmap. When one customer reports an issue, and it is fixed, then all benefit from this.

Then there is the issue with the “free-riders”. These are the people that recognize the issue, find workarounds and DON’T take the investment in time and resources of reporting the issue. They know and see the issue, but choose to live with it or ignore it. Then in many cases, Microsoft if not even aware of any issue, and the issues just continues to be present in future releases. The best way is to report what you see to Microsoft support or to Microsoft ideas. Then Microsoft can take action on it, because they know of it.

So, I urge my fellow community friends to not be a Free-Rider, but report your issues. This will ensure that we all can share the resource/time burden among us, and we also improve and strengthen Dynamics 365, that we all will benefit from.

PS! Dynamics 365 is the BEST business application in the world!

6 thoughts on “Report your bugs, free-riders!

  1. Well, where do i report bugs? A google search for “Report a Bug Dynamics 365” leads to … Connect, which does not exist anymore. And then…. nothing. Well, this blog. Yeah, I’d love to report stuff to Microsoft (like the non-paged and non-filterable “Add existing Webressource” dialog)… But I just cant.

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  2. Pingback: D365F&O – Community Driven Engineering - Kurt Hatlevik – Dynamics Ax Blog - Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations/AX User Group - Dynamics User Group

  3. D365FO is not a freeware, customers pay for subsription. Why should partner or customer spend their money to report a bug? If we pay for the product, the bug reporting process should be as easy as possible. May be MS should pay for a reported bug? If not directly, then reduce subsription fee for the next period.

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    • I don’t disagree with you:-) Microsoft have never promised a bug-free experience, and changing the current commercial conditions on CSP or EA seams to be close to impossible. This means that for the most part we must accept the situation, and share the load through the ecosystem. I’m spending a lot of time reporting bugs, issues, ideas and I see it helps. I do get fixes, new features and changes. But it is heavy effort, and I have no where to place theese costs. The solution is then to act as a responsible ecosystem, and that we all invest in getting a better Dynamics 365. The alternative is to look towards other systems, and I don’t think it is much greener there.

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      • Well – as we all know, the quality of D365FO leave to desire a lot. (I am speaking not just about the quality of the product itself, but about the quality of the whole environment). Because of it, most of the partners, implementing D365 are in serious overbudget. Formally speaking, Kurt is right about the fact, that spreading the burden of bug reporting amongst all partners can decrease the total burden. The only problem is that the whole idea of “ONE version” and “continuous update” for an ERP system is highly questionable. I would say that there is a very high chance that after a chain of failed updates and big industry-wide scandals, which will arise in this “ONE version” scenario, Microsoft will fall-back to the old update model. (Just look at the SAP who seems to fall-back to ‘ABAP in cloud’ approach). That’s why now most of the partners and the specialists took a “wait and see” approach. In the end, why would somebody want to invest his/her own unbillable time into a product without a realistic strategy and with quite dubious future?

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  4. Bussiness don’t need very innovation and most agile business software. Bussiness need stabile solution that could be easily fitted to it’s requirments.
    Each AX version becomes slower and slower.
    MS try to implement all innovations and create new products too fast for Enterprise sector. Instead of increse quality of ERP product.
    During more than 10 years we sending to MS bug reports, but the time and quality of response makes us unhappy.
    Clients can’t wait so long so the workarounds is only way to solve their issues intime.
    D365FO don’t change the situation. We have extensibility requests that not resolved during 3 monthes! MS announced extensibility architecture but system not ready for this concept.

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