Organize your team to develop solutions

Article
02/16/2022

This topic applies to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises). For the Power Apps version of this topic, see: Organize your team to develop solutions.

When multiple developers have to work on the same solution, you may want to create an environment where each developer can create customizations that will not interfere with the work of other developers. You may also need to move your solution from development environments to test environments and user acceptance testing (UAT) environments.

Strategies for team development

Some strategies to manage team development of solutions are as follows:

Single organization: One master solution

Multiple developers can work on a single organization; however, they have to be careful to work on separate components. This is easier when any prerequisite managed solutions (shared libraries) are installed first.

Single organization: Multiple developer solutions + master solution

In a single organization, you can create separate unmanaged solutions for each developer. Each solution contains a sub set of a master solution. Each solution component exists in only one unmanaged solution. Developers do not add existing solution components to the unmanaged solutions assigned to them. This provides a clear separation of components that are being modified. You do not have to merge changes because each developer's solution contains a reference to components that are contained in the master solution.

One organization per developer

Each developer can work on their own organization. To check their changes into Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises), they must export their solution as an unmanaged solution. The solution from each developer's organization is then imported into a master solution. Use the master solution to export the managed solution.

Deploy solutions from development through test and production environments

In development organizations, solutions are deployed into various test and staging environments for analysis before they are deployed into a production environment. The white paper Deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM Online Solutions from Development through Test and Production Environments explores how to deploy real-world Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises) solutions across test and production environments in reliable and repeatable ways by using automation. The paper also highlights specific constraints that exist when you deploy and test solutions in Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.