January 25th, 2018 by Adam Sandman
testing software development microsoft dynamics
Rapise is the most powerful and easy to use software testing tool on the market for testing Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We have many customers and partners using Rapise to streamline their testing of Dynamics products, cutting down the time to test every new patch, update, or customization. We recently had a webinar that demonstrated the best practices and tips and tricks for testing Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Don't worry if you missed the webinar, we have a recording available.
The webinar covered the following topics:
-
Why use Rapise to test Dynamics NAV
- Demonstration of a Sales Order test
- SpiraTeam integration
- Advanced concepts
- Test recording
- Rapise Visual Language
- How to build a test framework
- Partner Presentation showing End to End Example
- Q&A
Why use Rapise to test Dynamics NAV
When you consider testing Dynamics NAV, the first option to consider will be using the NAV Development Environment in which one can write unit tests in C/AL language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/AL).
However, there are several issues with this:
- The developers doing the configuration of NAV actually don't bother using C/AL for writing the unit tests, even though they are supposed to (sad reality).
- Unit tests written in C/AL do not touch the UI, they are related to data model and database. So if a field is not displayed on a form - C/AL test has no issues with reading/writing the value. So a unit test may pass while there is an issue in the workflow that will impact real users.
- If you test an integrated solution (when you need to do something in other systems (e.g. browser)) then C/AL can not help. It is limited to Dynamics NAV only.
- Writing tests with Rapise is faster. They had a contest at our partner - Global Mediator: Sergei used Rapise and one of their talented and experienced programmers used C/AL. Sergei implemented a test case (submitting a Sales Order) much faster (it took him 20% less time to implement).
There are some other options that our partner Global Mediator has tried:
- Other automation tools - Ranorex, TestComplete, but they were not able to handle Dynamics NAV objects and tables
- Microsoft Coded UI can be used to test Dynamics NAV. But it is unable to recognize and test any of the NAV grids. Since grids are used prolifically in NAV, then Coded UI is not a viable option.
End to End Testing Example
During the presentation, Sergei from our partner Global Mediator includes and end-to-end integration real-life example:
- They have a plugin for Dynamics NAV that loads in timesheet data from project management tools such as Atlassian Jira
- In the webinar they demonstrated automating the UI of Jira and NAV in a single integrated test. Testing Jira using a browser and NAV using the desktop.
If you missed the event, we have a recording on our YouTube channel:
and in addition, the presentation can be found on Slideshare: