Introduction

Much has been said about automated testing in Business Central lately. As more and more BC clients migrate to the cloud and evergreening becomes the key concept of an ERP implementation, test automation becomes the essential part of the customisations. On the one hand, this change is driven by Microsoft and frequent compulsory updates applied to Azure instances.

On the other hand, understanding of the importance of a thorough test coverage for the long-term success of an implementation project is gaining its proper stand in the minds of VAR partners and BC customers. We still have a long way ahead of us, but the old prejudice against test automation which presumably only increases the project cost without adding any value

is losing its mainstream positions, slowly, but inevitably (to my great satisfaction, I must admit).

Adoption of the automated testing techniques is not happening by itself, of course, this is all a part of a bigger change, the evolution of an ERP product into a component of a huge cloud ecosystem. Frequent updates instead of a once-in-a-decade upgrade, evergreening instead of a few end-to-end test runs at the end of a project, extension packages instead of core customisation - all these and many other ideas are building up to form a landslide change in the mindset of Business Central developers, consultants, and users. And even this transition into the SaaS world is in line with the general unprecedented pace of changes in technology we need to keep up with.

I have been driving a training and upskilling in automated testing for BC developers for some time now, and decided to summarise my experience in a series of blog posts.

My way of presenting the information in test automation training is focused on the mindset of a tester rather than technology. It's the spirit of quality that must drive the testing process, and the technology at hand can support the keen mind. And this is the approach I intend to follow.

Let's get started!