BCQuality

Quality skills and knowledge that help AI tools make better Business Central development decisions: catch BC-specific defects, avoid misleading advice, and explain findings with references you can read.

BCQuality contains knowledge and reusable skills, not agents or a Business Central extension. Your host supplies the agent. You can install the content as a plugin, use it from another integration, or browse the knowledge directly.

Quick start

The walkthrough below uses GitHub Copilot CLI in a terminal, not the Copilot Chat panel in VS Code. First install Copilot CLI and sign in. Your account and organization policy must allow its use. You do not need to clone BCQuality, build a runner, or deploy an app to Business Central for this source-review example.

Standalone plugin installation

Run these commands in your terminal:

copilot plugin install microsoft/BCQuality
copilot plugin list

The list should include bcquality. The plugin exposes al-code-review and the read-only al-development-plan plan-enrichment and al-implementation-guidance consultation skills. Installation and skill discovery are the general pattern; reviewing an app is one example of using it.

Plugin version 0.4.0 adds al-implementation-guidance, a read-only, just-in-time consultation over the current diff and decision context. It does not edit code or run an implementation workflow.

The adapters are intentionally not second implementations:

standalone host skill: skills/al-code-review/SKILL.md
  -> routing contract: skills/entry.md
    -> review coordinator: microsoft/skills/review/al-code-review.md
      -> domain review leaves

standalone host skill: skills/al-development-plan/SKILL.md
  -> routing contract: skills/entry.md
    -> enrichment skill: microsoft/skills/development/al-development-plan.md
      -> referenced constraints for the consumer's existing workflow (read-only)

standalone host skill: skills/al-implementation-guidance/SKILL.md
  -> routing contract: skills/entry.md
    -> consultation skill: microsoft/skills/development/al-implementation-guidance.md
      -> focused constraints for the consumer's next decision (read-only)

Only the files under skills/*/SKILL.md follow the host's packaging format. The remaining files are BCQuality's internal protocol and layered action skills. Entry remains the single owner of routing and index preparation. This separation keeps standalone installation available without duplicating policy in either adapter.

Example: Review a complete app folder

Start a new CLI session in your own app folder, replacing the example path:

cd "C:\Repos\MyBusinessCentralApp"
copilot

Approve access only to a project you trust, then ask:

Use the installed al-code-review skill to review the complete Business Central app in this folder without changing my source files. Return the complete BCQuality findings report.

The folder should contain app.json and your AL source; it does not need to be a Git repository. On macOS or Linux, use your app's local path instead.

Each host adapter and internal action skill intentionally share a name: they expose the same operation in two different skill formats. Their paths make the boundary explicit.

Expect a report for each selected review, with findings, source locations, severity, confidence, and references to the relevant guidance. Some hosts show the structured JSON directly. completed with no findings means nothing was flagged in that review's scope; partial or failed is not a clean result. See reading your results.

PowerShell 7 (pwsh) is recommended for fast knowledge discovery. If it is unavailable, the review can still discover knowledge by reading the folders.

Documentation

I want to...	Start here
Choose direct reading, a supplied skill, or my own agent	Ways to use BCQuality
Review a file, changes, a branch, or a particular concern	Using BCQuality
Resolve setup problems, incomplete reviews, or incorrect findings	Troubleshooting and support
Browse the available guidance	Knowledge by domain
Configure the plugin or use my organization's rules	Customizing BCQuality
Contribute knowledge or improve a rule	Your first contribution
Connect a host, agent, or CI integration	Minimal integration example

All documentation and technical references.

Scope

Today's curated content focuses on technical AL code review. It augments the agent's judgment; it is not an exhaustive BC manual or a substitute for compilation, analyzers, tests, or human review. See coverage and limits for the available domains and the difference between a folder review and a comparison. Mechanical issues already enforced by the AL compiler or standard analyzers are intentionally left to those deterministic tools rather than duplicated here.

The read-only al-development-plan interface selects relevant constraints before the consumer implements its own existing plan. The distinct al-implementation-guidance interface consults the same corpus after implementation begins and selects only constraints capable of changing the next bounded implementation or validation decision.

Repository-specific orchestrators retain planning, implementation, approvals, tests, environment, propagation, and delivery ownership. The intended flow is consumer analysis and normalized plan -> read-only plan guidance -> consumer implementation -> explicit read-only implementation checkpoints -> consumer edits and tests -> independent final BCQuality review -> delivery. BCQuality does not own checkpoint state or invoke itself automatically.

no-knowledge means no additional applicable BCQuality constraints, with empty knowledge; it does not make a plan unsafe or prevent the consumer from using its ordinary gates. Retrieval failures and materially unresolved conditional guidance are distinct outcomes, not empty knowledge. Do not add generic advice just to avoid a no-knowledge result.

Functional areas such as Finance, Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, Jobs, Warehousing, and Service, and technologies such as PowerShell, pipelines, and Power Platform, remain valid future scope, not current coverage claims.

Evidence and follow-up scope

The guidance evaluation separates credential-free contract/scorer regressions from external agent and runtime evidence. Prepared requests and fixture counts do not establish compilation, test execution, better repairs, or a capability percentage. Consumer adoption, a pinned baseline comparison and runtime pilot, standalone authoring, and source-ingestion catalog work remain separate follow-ups.

What's in this repo

Knowledge articles cover one concern each. Skills tell an agent how to find and apply the relevant knowledge. Both live in three layers:

Layer	Purpose
Microsoft	Microsoft-endorsed skills and their knowledge.
Community	Community-owned skills and their knowledge.
Custom	Organization-specific additions and overrides in your own fork.

Review skills emit a findings-report; plan enrichment emits development-guidance-report; implementation consultation emits implementation-guidance-report. All contracts are defined in skills/do.md. See how agents consume BCQuality for the integration flow.

All three are enabled by default; Custom is empty upstream. You do not need to configure layers to get started.

Versioning

Update the installed plugin from your terminal, then start a new session:

copilot plugin update bcquality

Plugin versions and content-release tags are different. For reproducible runs and organization forks, see updates and versions.

What belongs here

Knowledge belongs here when it prevents a BC-specific mistake an otherwise capable agent would make, including false-positive findings. BC facts belong in knowledge articles, not skill instructions. See the admission test and examples.

Contributing

Partners are welcome to contribute to the layer that owns the domain, regardless of affiliation. Start with the contribution guide. To report a problem without authoring a rule, see support.

License

MIT