Microsoft Dynamics 365 or D365 is a leading enterprise accounting and sales software that comprises different clusters of intelligent business applications spanning across operations, sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and supply chain management. According to Business Insider, over 500,000 organisations, including 97% of Fortune 500 companies, use D365 to power their commerce, finance, and supply chain management. With critical business processes relying on the AI-driven Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, it is absolutely imperative to ensure that the suite of applications remains functional through constant upgrades and updates. This requires a robust testing system to achieve continuous quality assurance.
Automated testing for D365 comes with its own set of challenges, mainly due to the interconnected and integrated workflows that rely on third-party applications. The challenge gets further exacerbated when we add new updates, version releases, maintenance upgrades, and changing UI functionality to the mix.
In this blog, we’ll outline all the primary challenges to testing Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications and how to overcome them with robust codeless test automation.
Why is continuous testing in D365 vital?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 forms the operational core of large global organisations, enabling disparate teams, processes, and applications to function together smoothly. But as more integrations are added to the platform, creating new data sources and data flows, the inherent complexity of the system increases exponentially. If even one of the interdependent processes breaks, critical business operations can get disrupted. That’s why it is essential to conduct continuous testing of the D365 ecosystem.
Continuous testing ensures that the applications, features, and functionalities continue to behave as intended. It prevents bugs and other inadvertent issues from creeping up and lets organisations keep pace with the constant roll-outs of new updates without facing disruptions.
What are the challenges of testing D365 applications?
Continuous testing for the D365 platform and its application suite can quickly become a challenge due to many reasons:
- The web application suite of D365 contains dynamic object IDs, nested iFrames, and deep object trees. It is a complex ecosystem that breaks most fragile test scripts that only test these elements on the object layer.
- The UI and markup language changes when you switch between different D365 applications. And every time that happens, there’s a high chance of tests breaking again.
- Creating an ID locator to identify web elements in the code for UI functionality is a job for only the most skilled coders and engineers. Organisations that lack the depth of resources will falter in this regard.
- Organisations are forced to make a choice between creating new test scripts or maintaining and fixing old scripts due to time, money, and resource constraints. Since the UI functionality is different for different D365 applications, testers spend more time maintaining old tests instead of creating new ones.
- The dynamic nature of D365 means that there’s a constant barrage of updates, upgrades, and version releases for core applications as well as the satellite suite. But to ensure that these changes do not affect critical business functionalities, organisations need to install a continuous verification, validation, and testing process.
- Testing issues can also stem from the reported compatibility issues between D365 and some web browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer.
- The modularity of the D365 ecosystem makes it more flexible but also makes end-to-end testing across a host of external systems, Office 365 products, and AppSource applications that much more complicated.
Best practices for achieving continuous quality assurance in Microsoft Dynamics 365
Encourage the IT team and the development team to work together
User journeys and custom workflows must be integrated with the correct business logic for them to add value to the ecosystem. This is only possible when the developers and business analysts work together to create business rules that can be easily integrated into the workflows.
Test across the entire spectrum of user experiences
Your D365 testing strategy must employ a wide variety of user journeys that cover multiple technologies, user interfaces, browsers, platforms, and devices. Organisations with offices all over the globe must ensure the same functionality for everyone, no matter the device or location. This requires exploratory testing, codebase verification, and UI validation.
End-to-end testing for all integrations
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is known for its flexible integration of ERP and CRM features apart from tools from Office 365 and third-party applications. But without end-to-end testing to validate all integrations, there’s a high probability of the ecosystem failing to function as intended.
Use codeless test automation
Manually testing D365 applications is a slow and tedious process due to the upgrades, custom workflow assemblies, integrations, and new configurations. Not only do the test scripts break often, but they also fail to conduct robust end-to-end testing. The continuous quality assurance necessitated by D365’s complexity can only be performed by a powerful codeless test automation solution that is scalable, agile, and platform-agnostic.
Avo Assure is one such codeless heterogeneous test automation solution that offers up to 90% testing coverage, 60% shorter testing cycles, in-sprint automation, and seamless CI/CD integrations. It comes with a pre-built test library for D365, smart scheduling, parallel and cross-browser testing, self-healing, and elastic grid execution for greater testing efficiency, fewer bugs, and faster releases. To learn more about Avo Assure, book a demo today.
