Automated Application Testing: Strategy and ROI

Automated Tests: Definition and Typology

What is an automated test and why automate?

An automated test is a script that verifies, without human intervention, that an application behaves as expected. It runs in the delivery pipeline, with every commit or before every deployment, and immediately returns a result: success or failure.

Of course, automation doesn't replace all manual tests. Exploratory tests, for instance, which evaluate usability or detect unexpected issues, remain a human responsibility. What automated tests handle is the repetitive aspect of operations where the same scenarios must be replayed with each evolution to ensure nothing has broken.

Let's take a concrete example: a Power Apps leave management application. An automated test verifies that an employee can submit a request, that their manager receives the notification, and that the approval updates the available leave balance. This scenario runs automatically with every application modification, usually in a few seconds or minutes. Without automation, it would have to be replayed manually with each release.

The different types of tests: unit, integration, end-to-end

According to the test pyramid heuristic popularized by Mike Cohn in Succeeding with Agile, a balanced strategy generally favors a majority of unit tests, complemented by integration tests and a more limited number of end-to-end tests. However, this distribution is not a universal rule.

For a customized CRM Dynamics 365 application, this concretely translates into unit tests on C# plugins, integration tests on custom APIs, and a few E2E tests covering the "create an opportunity, qualify it, convert it to an account" journey.

Functional vs. Non-functional Tests: Covering All Aspects

The quality of an application isn't just about answering the question "does it work?". Indeed, while functional tests verify that business logic is respected, other dimensions are just as important:

• The performance tests ensure the application remains responsive under load, with dozens or hundreds of simultaneous users.
• The security tests automated tests can identify many common vulnerabilities, such as certain SQL injections or XSS flaws, without replacing a comprehensive security analysis.
• The accessibility tests automated tests can verify a significant portion of RGAA or WCAG criteria, but must be supplemented by human reviews for a complete evaluation.

All these checks can be integrated into an automated pipeline and executed regularly, without manual intervention.

The Business Benefits of Automated Testing

Drastically reduce bugs and regressions in production

A regression is a feature that worked perfectly but breaks after a modification, sometimes in a seemingly unrelated module. It's the most insidious bug because it often appears in production, where the impact is maximal.

Automated tests replay all known scenarios with every modification. Therefore, if a developer modifies a calculation module and critical scenarios fail, the pipeline flags it immediately, before any deployment.

So, what would have been discovered by users in production, sometimes hours after going live, is, thanks to automated tests, detected earlier in the development environment. The cost of correction is therefore significantly lower.

Accelerate delivery cycles and improve agility

In many organizations, the manual tests end up constraining the delivery pace as much as development itself. Several days of validation before each release, QA teams fully engaged in repetitive scenarios, a monthly deployment at best: quality becomes a bottleneck where it should be an accelerator.

With automated tests, validating a release takes only a few tens of minutes. Consequently, deployments become more frequent, and features reach business users more quickly.

This is the principle of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment): deliver often, deliver with confidence.

Free up teams from repetitive and time-consuming tasks

Manually re-running the same test scenarios for each release is one of the most demotivating and error-prone tasks. A QA team that spent three days per release testing login, entity creation, modification, deletion, can, once these scenarios are automated, dedicate this time to exploring edge cases, improving user experience, or strengthening coverage for new features.

Just as industrial robots free operators from repetitive tasks to focus on supervision and continuous improvement, automated tests evolve the QA role from repetitive executor to strategic quality expert.

Simplify application maintenance and evolution over time

A five-year-old business application without automated tests is an application no one dares to modify. However, this fear of "breaking everything" hinders evolution, causing the accumulation of technical debt and makes modernization particularly risky.

Automated tests act as a living documentation of the expected behavior. They enable refactoring that is progressive and secure, improving the code with the knowledge that any regression will be immediately detected.

They also facilitate the integration of new developers, who can understand how the application should work simply by reading the tests.

Implementing a pragmatic automated testing strategy

Assess current maturity and identify priorities

Before getting started, an assessment is essential:

• How many critical applications lack automated tests?
• What is the volume of production incidents each month?
• How many days of manual testing are required before each major release?

This data helps quantify the current cost of poor quality and build a strong ROI case.

To help you, maturity models like the TMMi (Test Maturity Model integration), maintained by the TMMi Foundation, allow the organization to position itself on a structured scale and identify its priority areas for improvement.

Start with the highest-value tests: a progressive approach

Often, there's an attempt to achieve exhaustive coverage from the outset. This is actually a mistake which leads to endless projects and budget overruns, not to mention difficult adoption.

Following the Pareto principle, a relatively limited number of features often account for the majority of usage and therefore deserve significant attention in the testing strategy.

For a CRM application, this means prioritizing the automation of tests for the "create sales opportunity, send quote, convert to order" workflow, which is used dozens of times a day, rather than testing administrative features that are rarely accessed.

In other words, a few well-targeted tests on critical elements are better than many scattered tests on low-impact features.

Integrate testing into the development process (CI/CD)

Automated tests that don't run automatically are useless. Their entire value lies in their integration into the CI/CD pipeline : with every developer commit for immediate feedback, with every pull request for validation before merging, and before any production deployment for a final check.

The "broken build" principle is central: if tests fail, no one can deploy. This concretely means fixing issues immediately rather than postponing them to the production phase.

On an Azure DevOps pipeline for Power Apps, the typical flow is as follows:

• solution export;
• component validation;
• deployment to a test environment;
• execution of automated tests using tools adapted to the project context;
• deployment to pre-production.

Train teams and foster a quality culture

Tools alone are not enough. In fact, automated test suites rarely fail because of the tools themselves. Instead, they fail because teams are not trained, not convinced, or because tests are not maintained as changes occur.

A skill development program that is progressive, combining initial training, team practice sessions, and pair programming on the first tests, is, as you can imagine, far more effective than deploying tools without support.

Appointing a quality champion within the team promotes the adoption of best practices and helps maintain momentum over time. In practice, the success of an automated testing approach often relies more on team practices than on the choice of tools.

Automated Testing in the Microsoft Ecosystem

Power Apps Test Studio: testing your low-code applications

Power Apps Test Studio is one of the tools offered by Microsoft to automate testing for Canvas apps. Without writing much code, it allows you to record user interactions, define assertions on expected results, and automatically execute these scenarios.

However, the tool has its limitations, including:

• coverage of certain components is partial;
• complex or multi-application scenarios often require supplementation with other tools.

For the most industrialized scenarios, Microsoft also highlights the Power Fx Test Engine, which offers greater flexibility in delivery pipelines. However, for the majority of business Canvas Apps, Test Studio provides an accessible entry point, even for less technical profiles.

Azure DevOps: Orchestrating Your Testing Strategy

Azure DevOps serves as a central hub in an industrialized testing strategy. Azure Pipelines orchestrates build, test, and deployment sequences, while Azure Test Plans allows for managing manual and automated tests in a single space, without fragmenting quality tracking across multiple tools.

What distinguishes Azure DevOps from a simple orchestrator is the traceability it offers: each test can be linked to a user story or a bug in the backlog, immediately revealing the impact of a change on existing coverage. Combined with the configuration of quality gates, meaning thresholds below which no deployment is allowed, this visibility transforms quality from an intention into an effective operational constraint.

Playwright and Selenium: Testing Custom Web Applications

For custom-developed web applications in .NET, React, or Angular, as well as for customized Dynamics 365 portals, Playwright and Selenium are the go-to frameworks. They simulate a real browser, replicating user interactions (click, input, navigation) across all common browsers.

Playwright, developed by Microsoft, is now widely adopted for new projects and is known for its execution speed, stability on modern browsers, and developer-friendliness.

Selenium remains relevant for existing projects where it is already implemented. These frameworks are written in code (C#, JavaScript, Python), which gives them significantly greater flexibility than record & replay tools, at the cost of a steeper learning curve.

Automated testing is no longer just for large development teams at tech giants. Any organization that develops or maintains critical business applications stands to benefit from adopting it, provided they take a phased approach.

The Microsoft ecosystem offers a comprehensive suite, from Power Apps Test Studio and Power Fx Test Engine for low-code, to Azure DevOps for orchestration and Playwright for custom applications. The rest depends on the quality culture you're willing to foster within your teams.

Are you looking to evaluate the quality maturity of your applications and identify your first automation quick wins? Contact Askware for a scoping workshop tailored to your context.