Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a powerful and expansive platform. It is an amazing set of tools for businesses that need to build ERP or CRM apps tailored to their needs.
From a QA perspective, however, Dynamics 365’s broad range of capabilities, modules, and integration options can be deeply challenging. When there are so many ways to build and configure Dynamics 365 apps, designing and executing tests that cover all functionality and deliver reliable results is no mean feat.
Of course, Microsoft offers a partial solution to this challenge: Playwright. Microsoft released Playwright in 2020 partly to address the technical complexities and test flakiness challenges posed by modern development platforms like Dynamics.
Yet, on its own, Playwright is only a step toward taming the complexity of Dynamics 365 testing. A more complete strategy requires thinking beyond test frameworks in isolation and addressing all layers of the testing workflow. We discuss what this looks like below.
Why Dynamics 365 testing is difficult
At a high level, testing Dynamics 365-developed apps is challenging because Dynamics includes so many features and options. But the difficulties don’t stop there. Dynamics 365 apps also typically include components or characteristics like the following, making reliable testing and broader coverage even harder to pull off:
- Dynamic UI elements: Dynamics 365 can generate changing IDs, classes and DOM structures, making brittle selectors prone to breaking.
- Asynchronous operations: Forms, fields, grids and business processes can load or update dynamically, creating timing issues for test automation.
- Extensive customization: Each organization can have different entities, fields, workflows, plugins, forms and business rules, making tests highly environment-specific.
- Complex business workflows: Testing often requires navigating multi-step processes involving approvals, validations, permissions and related records.
- Authentication and permissions: Microsoft Entra ID, MFA, conditional access and different Dynamics 365 security roles can complicate automated login and user-role testing.
- Heavy integration dependencies: Dynamics 365 applications commonly interact with Dataverse, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, APIs and external systems. Failures in those dependencies can look like application-test failures.
Playwright is great but doesn’t address everything
Playwright is a great tool that was conceived, in part, to solve some of these very challenges. Playwright excels at handling the complexities of modern Web apps, like dynamic UI components and asynchronous workflows.
That said, Playwright doesn’t address all of the challenges facing a typical Dynamics 365 QA team. Managing authentications, for example, can be fraught because Playwright expects engineers to be able to do things like create dedicated test tenants to bypass MFA requirements. That’s not always possible in practice.
More broadly, Playwright on its own doesn’t include capabilities for designing tests, analyzing test results and trends, or keeping tests up-to-date as applications evolve. These are all critical requirements for organizations that need to validate Dynamics 365 applications continuously.
Where Leapwork Play fits in
They’re also reasons why we created Leapwork Play. Play keeps Playwright at the center of Dynamics 365 test automation while adding the governance, reuse, and audit capabilities needed to manage that automation as it grows. The result is the ability to test and release Dynamics 365 apps with confidence while still taking full advantage of the flexibility and customizability of the Dynamics platform.
Teams can import and reuse existing Playwright tests and GitHub source without rewriting them. Role-based access controls, approvals, and audit trails help govern how validation assets are managed, while deterministic execution (with no model call at runtime) ensures that the same input produces the same result on every run. Evidence-linked steps can also be traced back to their source requirements, making results easier to explain and defend.
This governance is particularly valuable when Dynamics 365 applications evolve, since reusable components and self-healing automation can help reduce the maintenance burden associated with changing interfaces and workflows. Instead of leaving teams with a collection of individually maintained scripts, Play turns Playwright tests into governed, reusable assets that can be owned across the organization and connected to CI/CD workflows through integrations with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins.
