How to takle all the challenges with BC SaaS?

It’s been a while since my last blog post and this time its not about a technical topic. I have just watched the (right now) latest video from @SteveEndow and he asks a lot of questions and leaves open the answers. I just feel like I could share a few of my thoughts about some of those topics, related to Business Central. So if you did not watch the video already, you should watch it before continuing reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx2GcC4Y8y0

How do we learn all this and manage to not fall behind?

To answer this question I think we need to ask why we need to learn all this stuff?

Going back about 6, maybe 10 years our jobs were about Dynamics NAV. And the world around NAV was spinning a whole lot slower. Many solutions out there were build as custom(er) solution and were upgraded as frequently as the customer upgrades. Which, in many cases, was either never, or once every 5 years. And that means, only once or twice at all.

Why is it important to consider where we came from?
Well, we were used to much less “professional” development. We did not support or foresee many customers/customer requirements. We did not need to keep the effort of upgrading low, because the customer needs/wants the upgrade and therefore has to pay for it. This also means that writing automated tests was absolutely overkill at that point.

But then Business Central and SaaS came

Lets consider the same customer with a custom solution or piece of code in a SaaS Business Central environment. That solution will now be called a PTE. And the customer maybe happy to have all those new tools, the integrations with Microsoft 365 and only needs to pay a monthly fee to use all this.

But the PTE he uses now needs to be upgraded every.single.month! And this brings up some new challenges for the developer. And by now we all now what this is, Steve talked about this in his video.

But all this is nothing new in the software industry, its only somewhat new for NAV/BC people. Its “professional” software development.

Compared to the speed things changed with NAV and what we were used to, Microsoft forced us almost over night, to change from hobby development to professional software development. And that is huge task for most of us.

And IMHO it all comes down to this. A one man show, can do hobby development, but never real professional software development. We can only focus on some tasks from that list and work together with others to takle all of them.

That’s what I have to say about this.
Have a good one and a happy new year!