4 minute read

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the Power Platform has become a cornerstone for many organizations, enabling rapid development and deployment of applications.

As an Enterprise Architect or someone who works with your Enterprise Architecture team, your role is crucial in ensuring that these solutions are not only agile but also scalable, secure, and reliable. This guide aims to provide a high-level overview of various aspects of testing in the context of low-code solutions, addressing key topics that matter to IT leadership and business leaders who have invested in the Power Platform.

The Strategic Importance of Automated Testing

Automated testing is essential for modern software development, particularly for low-code solutions on the Power Platform. It ensures that applications are sustainable, reliable, secure, and performant. Automated tests provide a safety net, ensuring that new features do not break existing functionality and that the application remains robust as it evolves. This is critical for maintaining the trust and confidence of stakeholders in the rapid development cycles of low-code solutions.

The Limitations of Manual Testing

While manual testing has its place, it is not sufficient on its own. Manual testing is time-consuming, prone to human error, not scalable, and offers limited test coverage. Automated testing addresses these limitations by providing faster feedback, consistency, scalability, and increased test coverage. By incorporating automated testing into your development process, you can achieve faster feedback, greater consistency, scalability, and increased test coverage, ultimately leading to higher quality software.

Scaling to Enterprise Grade

As your solutions scale, the need for robust testing practices becomes more critical. Growing to enterprise-grade involves adopting a model that can deploy on demand and rapidly respond to new features, errors, or security requirements. This model relies on the confidence provided by automated tests, allowing you to meet business needs while adhering to continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) processes. Automated testing plays a critical role in achieving and maintaining enterprise-grade quality, providing confidence in deployments, faster time to market, improved quality, and scalability.

Impacts on People, Process, and Tooling

The integration of low-code solutions with existing automated testing and continuous integration (CI) practices is crucial. This approach, known as the “no cliffs” extensibility model, ensures that investments in automated testing and CI can be seamlessly integrated into low-code environments. This model supports both low-code-only and code-first deployment models, offering the best of both worlds. By leveraging low-code testing tools, organizations can accelerate testing, reduce bottlenecks, enhance collaboration, and maintain quality.

The Transformative Power of AI

The transformative power of AI in automated testing lies in its ability to observe by example as you interact with the created low-code solution. By augmenting this with your knowledge and expectations of how the solution should work, Generative AI can suggest comprehensive test suites and cases. These suggestions cover expected “happy path” tests, edge cases, and exception cases, bridging the gap in domain knowledge of testing practices that may be new to many developers. By leveraging Generative AI and Power Fx, developers can ensure that their low-code solutions are thoroughly tested and meet high standards of quality and reliability.

The Challenges of Using Code-First Testing Tools

For many code-first developers, the initial inclination is to use familiar code-first testing tools like Playwright when working with low-code solutions. While this approach might seem logical, it can present several challenges, particularly in terms of scalability and efficiency. Code-first testing tools require specialized skills, which can be scarce, creating bottlenecks in the testing process. Low-code testing tools, on the other hand, are designed to be user-friendly, require minimal coding skills, and can be quickly integrated into the development workflow. By adopting low-code testing tools and following the “Keep it simple” principle, organizations can overcome these challenges, ensuring that their low-code solutions are tested efficiently and effectively.

Guiding Principles for Low-Code Testing

To ensure the reliability and functionality of low-code applications, it is essential to follow and refine guiding principles for low-code testing. These principles include:

  • Record and Replay: Capture user interactions and system responses during the recording phase and replay these interactions to validate the system’s behavior.
  • Isolation: Ensure tests are isolated by controlling inputs and dependent connectors, allowing the tests to focus solely on the logic and behavior of the application.
  • Human in the Loop: Use the knowledge of the maker or developer to express in natural language what the system is doing and what it is intended to do.
  • Generative AI for Test Suggestions: Leverage AI to suggest relevant tests by analyzing the known structure and behavior of low-code apps.
  • State Changes Observation: Monitor the state changes of variables and collections during test execution to ensure correct state transitions.
  • Single Responsibility Tests: Design each test to focus on a single item or functionality, making tests simple and easy to understand.
  • Assertion for Verification: Include assertions to validate that the system behaves as expected and meets the defined requirements.
  • Abstract Complexity: Utilize the extensibility model of Power Fx to define test functions that encapsulate complex logic and interactions.
  • Trust: Treat failing tests as representations of failures that need to be fixed, ensuring that test results are taken seriously.
  • Simplicity: Ensure tests are easy to understand and require minimal setup, making them more reliable.

Conclusion

As an Enterprise Architect, your role is to ensure that low-code solutions align with the broader organizational strategy and meet the highest standards of quality. By embracing comprehensive testing strategies, you can facilitate meaningful conversations with IT leadership and business decision makers, ensuring that the applications they create are scalable, secure, and reliable. Together, we can harness the transformative power of low-code development to drive innovation and achieve strategic goals.

Let’s continue this conversation and explore how these principles can be applied in your organization to drive innovation and achieve strategic goals. Your insights and feedback are invaluable as we strive to build robust, enterprise-grade solutions on the Power Platform.