Book Image

Automated Testing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Second Edition

Book Image

Automated Testing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-based SaaS ERP proposition from Microsoft. With development practices becoming more formal, implementing changes or new features is not as simple as it used to be back when Dynamics 365 Business Central was called Navigator, Navision Financials, or Microsoft Business Solutions-Navision, and the call for test automation is increasing. This book will show you how to leverage the testing tools available in Dynamics 365 Business Central to perform automated testing. Starting with a quick introduction to automated testing and test-driven development (TDD), you'll get an overview of test automation in Dynamics 365 Business Central. You'll then learn how to design and build automated tests and explore methods to progress from requirements to application and testing code. Next, you'll find out how you can incorporate your own as well as Microsoft tests into your development practice. With the addition of three new chapters, this second edition covers in detail how to construct complex scenarios, write testable code, and test processes with incoming and outgoing calls. By the end of this book, you'll be able to write your own automated tests for Microsoft Business Central.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Automated Testing – A General Overview
4
Section 2:Automated Testing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
7
Section 3:Designing and Building Automated Tests for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
12
Section 4:Integrating Automated Tests in Your Daily Development Practice
15
Section 5:Advanced Topics
19
Section 6:Appendix

Headless versus UI

As mentioned before, headless testing is the preferred mode for automated tests as it is faster than UI testing. With test example 1 and 3, we did implement the same kind of test: check that a lookup value can be assigned to a customer. Test example 1 is in headless mode, while test example 3 uses the UI. Running both tests indeed shows that UI tests are slower than headless tests, measured over 12 different runs. Have a look at the graph of execution duration (in seconds) in Figure 6.10:

Figure 6.10 – Test run duration of headless vs. UI tests

The average execution duration for the UI tests is 1.35 seconds, while the headless average is almost 7 times faster: 0.20 seconds.

Note

Recently an attendee of one of my online courses showed me an example of two of his tests achieving the same: one in headless mode and the other using the UI. In this specific case, the latter was even 50 times slower!