Keep Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Your Business Running Smoothly with Automation Testing
Businesses have to run smoothly at all times – any hiccup or obstacle impacts the bottom line and can instantly send things spiraling out of control. The foundation of modern business is technology.
Virtually every company in the world relies on computer systems to function. When a company’s technology grinds to a halt – your business suffers. Dynamic 365 automation testing is a cornerstone of keeping your IT systems running at their best.
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365?
Dynamics 365 is a combination of two popular applications: ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The designers also threw in a few other related applications combined with AI-based tools to fine-tune a one-stop solution favored by many businesses and FinOps to manage customer service, finance, marketing, retail, sales, customer insights, eCommerce, operations, and more.
Everything is seamlessly woven into each other and also integrates with other productivity applications and tools to help businesses make intelligent and quick decisions. D365 automated testing is one additional step that ensures all components continue functioning so business can function without missing a beat.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 has emerged as a cornerstone for modern business function. It serves many valuable objectives such as third-party applications, back-end systems, and integrating workflow activities. As a true workhorse, it experiences constant updates to ensure it meets the relentless needs of the rigorous fast-paced business world to safeguard that the user interface continues to function as expected. It is critical that you use Dynamics 365 automated testing to ensure ongoing function. Also, it is available in 24 languages which makes localization testing crucial and mandatory.
Selecting the Right Dynamics Automation Tool
When it comes to choosing the right Dynamics automated testing tool, the first factor to consider is whether to utilize the free built-in product known as the RSAT. This is only available for the Dynamics FinOps tool and comes with a number of limitations, such as the following:
- It is time-consuming to set up the RSAT environment, and build and maintain tests. A third-party tool for Dynamics 365 automating testing, like TheTestMart, is up to 80% faster to set-up and maintain tests.
- The RSAT tool lacks pre-built testing templates so customers have to build tests from scratch. Other tools come with a library of standard tests and commands for D365 FinOps.
- Dynamics customers have complained that the RSAT error reporting function is too complex. It is important to look for a tool that offers intuitive and easy to understand error reporting when troubleshooting.
- As mentioned above, customers can only use RSAT within FinOps, so testing outside of this product requires the selection and use of an additional toolset.
- Another important capability RSAT lacks is Load Testing. This is essential to ensuring efficiency, stability and identifying any performance bottlenecks prior to deployment.
- RSAT requires specialized knowledge and expertise to take full advantage of its capabilities, which can be difficult to find in the local market.
The items listed above are key considerations to look out for when choosing the right Dynamics 365 testing automation software. In many cases, paying the extra cost of a third-party automation tool may save you money in the long run.
When is Testing Needed?
As businesses evolve and change, Dynamics 365 out-of-the-box functions may not meet the company’s needs so a developer will configure the building blocks in such a way, so it better serves the business needs. This is an ongoing process as a company’s requirements continue to change.
Whenever a developer changes code it impacts function and bugs can emerge. In such a situation. d365 automated testing can catch things and work out the kinks. This is true any time things are customized or updated. Always remember, frequent updates increase the need for testing to ensure that everything continues to work well. Microsoft is notorious for releasing recent updates that often change a developer’s customization.
Dynamics 365 Automated Testing
The need for d365 automated testing is ongoing. Any time the building block’s structure is changed or customized, testing must occur. Frequent updates also cause the need for more testing
Challenges of Dynamics 365 Testing
Dynamics 365 is a suite that is made up of complex web applications. These things are fragile and often break.
- Switching between Dynamics 365 applications often spurs changes in the markup language and UX which causes broken tests.
- Testing tools used to identify web elements located within the UX functionality code takes skilled IT engineers and an abundance of resources to devise an effective ID locator strategy.
- Altering UX functions throughout Microsoft 365 requires ongoing test maintenance which can become awfully expensive to fix and might prevent you from creating new scripts.
- Upgrades, maintenance, and version releases need ongoing verification and validation to stay intact which takes a great deal of work carried out by test engineers.
- Dynamic 365 has a reputation for integration problems and compatibility issues with Internet Explorer and Firefox which can all cause ongoing testing problems.
- Occasionally, a business will want to use Office 365 products or applications from an app store to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 which requires extensive and time-consuming end to end testing.
Manual or D365 Automated Testing?
Dynamics requires frequent testing, but many might wonder how it should be done – manually or automated.
Manual UI tests are typically carried out after a list of expectations and requirements are set up by a team of techs. They will manually click through the Dynamics 365 setup to determine which ones fail or pass. Undoubtedly this requires a great deal of time and resources and there is always the risk of human error which is why most forego manual testing for automation.
With automation, the computer runs its tests which significantly speeds up the process, takes away the potential for human error and lets techs focus on other tasks.
Undoubtedly automated testing is critical but there is sometimes a need for manual testing if the task is extremely advanced.
What Can be Automated in D365?
Login
An automatic login is common with Dynamics applications. The user’s credentials are automatically transferred from their Microsoft account login information to the Dynamics application. Carrying out login testing helps you verify the various features and updates through all of the users and their roles.
Forms
Correct data generation matters with Dynamics. A text will create new data such as a contact in a sales application. Consider the various forms and fill-in types such as drop-downs, look-up fields, two option fields, data, and plain test for testing.
Read Data
Dynamics integrates with many applications and products. Maintaining the integrity of all data becomes challenging, especially if entering data throughout multiple channels. Creating a variety of tests that read and verify data are a huge benefit.
Finding Items
Tests will automatically locate items and data entries through the lists and views of dynamics. An automation tool often lets you input values dynamically from web services, spreadsheets, databases, and other areas.
Data-Driven Automation
Source data from contacts and other extreme spreadsheets using data driven automation testing. Data driven automation compared to automation that relies on data that is hard coded into each test is far more scalable and lets you evaluate for a limitless number of data combinations effortlessly and automatically.
Benefits of Testing Using a No-Code Tool
Are you familiar with the following concepts?
- Nested iFrames (also called an inline frame)
- Frame object
- Dynamic IDs for child windows
They sound complex and unfamiliar to most people which shows why it’s so hard to automate using scripts. If they are in the complete dark about what the terms even mean, then scripting for tests is going to be extremely challenging. However, don’t feel bad because most people who are not tech experts have no clue about concepts.
Even tasks that some view as ‘simple’ such as making a Selenium WebDrive requires time and being able to find the proper element in the application. You are going to spend a considerable amount of time just scripting the locator strategy.
Ask yourself, do you want to waste time doing this if there is an easier option? Time is money and can easily impact your company’s profitability over the long term.
Instead use automating Dynamics 365 testing with a no-code approach to streamline things, save time, and ensure everything is carried out correctly. You don’t have to worry about programming languages such as Java or C# when using automated testing. All scripting is replaced with an easy-to-understand drag and drop interface that is highly visual.
Anyone on your team can effortlessly participate and conduct tests so you save time and labor which impacts your bottom line. Not to mention, automated testing is far less of a headache and reduces stress.
Include Integrations in Dynamics 365 Testing
Combine CRM and ERP features along with other tools in Office 365 such as Excel, Word, and outlook – which are common day-to-day tools. Other third-party applications support business growth, drive innovation, and add crucial functions are also available on Microsoft’s AppSource.
End-to-end testing is a necessary step for any Include Integrations in Dynamics 365 Testing framework so that all integrations such as Slack, Outlook, or Jira continue to function and support your workflow activities across your entire Dynamic 365 platform along with every external system.
Automate Testing to Keep Pace and Stay Ahead
The following are some practices when automating to keep pace and stay ahead:
- An automation engineer should take a strategic approach with the customizable features. Focus on the personalized entities, codes and areas and which feature is being validated. Take an approach that focuses on system testing, regression, visual display, function, and localization.
- All automation frameworks should be robust, modular, and scalable. Test to ensure reusability of applications that are necessary for business actions.
- A multi-layer architecture of automation makes things much easier to maintain. Always include common application methods in additional layers so you can easily maintain them.
- Ensure that one layer of the framework implements applications that are application specific controls/objects. Keep things generic enough to be used throughout multiple test scripts by passing parameters.
- Use a resilient locator strategy to reduce the likelihood of script failure if there are fragile elements.
- Keep a clear strategy for visual display testing because GUI tests are often not dependable. Focus on discovering UI defects.
- Design and run tests as a real time user so you can more easily find defects
- Check that the framework supports automated testing using multiple environments.
- Newly added parts of Dynamics 365 often need more focused testing if they involve features, fields, and entities.
Planning Microsoft Dynamics 365 Testing Around Platform Updates
The update process of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is easy and quick. It is designed to take advantage of the latest technology. Two kinds of updates exist: regular monthly updates and updates that take place after the release of something major, which usually happens about twice per year.
Microsoft updates always happen in a very consistent and predictable manner, and they are usually very seamless so you have flexibility and can ensure that the update does not limit the capability.
The process of testing is easy. The updates always happen in a very consistent manner. Updates typically cause about 30 minutes to one hour of downtime for the update to successfully take.
You can plan your updates because all major releases have release notes that are available two to three months in advance. The release notes provide a comprehensive overview of the new functions that will occur with the release so you can ready yourself for any changes. A preview is released with the functionalities so your team can evaluate them to work out the new features.
The flexibility of Microsoft updates is a nice perk. If you feel that you don’t need the update and it’s not critical or you cannot afford the down time, then you can schedule the update for another time. You are never bound to follow the suggested time in the LIfecycle Services (LCS).
Updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 are backward compatible so you can use the latest version without needing to deploy customizations from previous versions. All protected metadata along with APIS is not changed during the update.
With automated D365 testing, all testing will be launched and triggered from updates. You never have to worry about remembering to test or wasting excessive amounts of time manually conducting the function. Instead, you can rest assured that the automation testing is detecting any problems that may occur as a result of the update. With automated testing, you stay ahead which is what most businesses strive to do to ensure ongoing success and profitability.