A gift that keeps on giving! I’m referring to testing of a complex and highly customised ERP solution with D365 as the centrepiece with more than 50 up/downstream integration points with several key in-house and SAAS web applications. D365 alone needs at least 2 major version upgrades in a 12 month period but depending on the changes, up to 4 major version upgrades may be required. This does not include all of the minor upgrades from Microsoft (PQUs) as well as the in-house enhancements and bug fixes released on a monthly basis and of course updates to the up/downstream applications and the middleware. This required a large test team to run some/all of the 400 high priority regression tests to provide assurance whenever any of the components in the solution ecosystem underwent any change. Clearly not a desirable long-term approach for the business so it was time to automate these tests.

Having a mature set of regression tests provided the team with a stable and well-defined backlog for test automation and all that remained was to choose a framework. After taking several factors into consideration including cost of implementation vs cost of maintenance, open source vs licensed products, ease of training test engineers, etc, Playwright was chosen as the basis of our framework. After a 4 month POC and 2 months building an automation engineering team, 6 months down the track we exceed our target of 100 automated tests and now have 140 automated tests. A notable ROI as this has already resulted in significant cost reduction to the business with far shorter test cycles.

Takeaways from your talk: Successful implementation of a Playwright and NodeJS framework

Quirks and challenges automating tests in D365

Tricks and tips when automating with Playwright

Building a successful test automation team

What’s next, i.e. the roadmap