Detecting differences between versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV

TR-2010-129, Author: Morten Rhiger

Detecting differences between versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Morten Rhiger

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an Enterprise Resource Planning system developed by Microsoft. NAV is customized to specific countries, industrial segments, and enterprises by software developers both from the Microsoft Cooperation and from a chain of independent partners.

In NAV, customizations are implemented as source-code modifications. This customization mechanism is flexible, since customizations are not limited to specific models imposed by implementation language or external customization tools. Therefore, it directly contributes to maintaining and enlarging the set of countries, industrial segments, and enterprises reachable by NAV. However, the customization mechanism of NAV imposes a significant cost of migrating customizations between different versions of the core product.

This reports describes tools developed with the purpose of detecting and characterizing customizations applied to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We propose to detect customizations by identifying differences between original and customized versions of NAV. In order to enable analyzes of the detected customizations, we furthermore suggest that differences are represented as hierarchically structured tree alignments .

The primary components of the tools are an implementation of by Jiang, Wang, and Zhang’s algorithm for computing tree alignments and its use in a tool that detects changes between two different version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The report serves both as a manual to using the tools and to modifying the tools. The tools described in this report were implemented by the author between August 2008 and July 2009 when he was associated with a research project on Evolvable Software Products involving the IT University of Copenhagen and Microsoft Dynamics, Vedbæk, Denmark.