Ensuring Risk-free Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 F&O Migration with Continuous Test Automation

July 29, 2021

/Iffat Ara Khanam/

“88% of enterprises that migrated their On-premise ERP systems to the cloud ranked their initiative as successful.” – Panorama Consulting Research

However, both the ‘leaders’ and the ‘laggers’ reported specific recurrent issues –

45% experienced budget overruns during ERP migration;
58% had to deal with timeline overruns. On average, these were 11% over the original timeline.

Organizations that are looking to migrate from Dynamics AX (on-premise) to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (D365 F&O) need to understand that it is much more than a simple technology transition. Apart from feeling worried about the business continuity, business users, owners, & IT heads must be pondering how to keep up with tight migration timelines and budgets. Since the incorporation of testing in SDLC is something that greatly influences software delivery, organizations that get stuck in migration projects need to realize the importance of automation to deliver software more rapidly and with fewer errors.

In this article, we’ll discuss how introducing “continuous delivery” & “continuous testing” in Dynamics AX migration can help you achieve your project timelines and budgets.

Challenges that hold you back in Dynamics 365 migration initiative

Customizations: Microsoft Dynamics AX is a complex web application that can be customized easily to meet business requirements. While migrating to D365 F&O, business users need to understand how functions and processes interacting with AX today may get impacted. Furthermore, they want to analyze the impact on the organization as a whole due to migration.
Integration: Dynamics AX can be integrated seamlessly with Office 365, EDI, 3PL, & other third-party applications. It may not be necessary that these integrations work in the new cloud environment. Only, end-to-end integration testing can ensure that whether or not integrations are working as expected.
Workflow Approvals: The cloud environment of Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations can be configured rather than customized. So, enterprises need to embrace some standard processes, and workflows. So, key workflow approvals and critical reports need to be validated to ensure business continuity in the cloud.
Update Adoption Readiness: Post live, enterprises need to prepare for continuous adoption of frequent application updates (Wave 1 & Wave 2). Microsoft updates constantly affect business processes with changes. So, enterprises need to prepare to accommodate updates.

Your way ahead towards Continuous Testing

Test automation acts as the “sole source of truth” for all changes that occur throughout the MSD system, enabling effective launch planning and delivery. Quality is “shifted left” to an earlier stage in the development life cycle, where problems are quickly identified through automated analysis. The result is less rework, shorter cycle times, and faster and more secure automatic deployment of the entire system.

Continuous Testing: Continuous test automation makes the job of building MS Dynamics systems in the cloud and manage them alongside on-premise systems is much easier, which means a cheaper transition and fewer interruptions after go-live.
Automated Change Management: Automated change management makes the infrastructure transparent. Users just don’t need to worry about what hosted where, and the dynamic nature of cloud-based environments, where systems can be easily added or removed, fits without increasing complexity or risk.
Script-free Regression Testing: Regression testing is a big problem here too. Although certain parts of your system can be optimized to take advantage of the cloud, there will be a lot of unchanged functionality that just needs to keep working as it did before. The right kind of automated, regression test ensures you can be confident of your move to the cloud that will have no unexpected consequences.

Opkey – Ensuring Seamless, Risk-free Dynamic AX to Dynamics 365 Migration

Opkey provides an end-to-end continuous testing platform for on-premise to cloud migrations with 90% more efficient tests sustainable for migration and post-migration approaches. OpKey’s AI-powered test automation technology monitors MS Dynamics at a code-and-system level, discovering deep technical interactions and execution paths. Smart Test Recorder of Opkey automatically observes and records exactly how users interact with live systems, using this information to create a comprehensive regression test library.

Opkey’s Pre-built Test Accelerator accelerates both your preparation for the move and maintenance and improvement of systems after go-live, helping you to make sure you’re always able to make the most of what MS Dynamics 365 has to offer. With Opkey’s MS Dynamics Impact Analysis, you can take a systemic approach to identify and tracking risk in any new Microsoft change rollouts or Platform updates and gain immediate visibility to real-time risks with an end-to-end Change Management platform.

Iffat Ara Khanam

Technical Content Lead

Iffat is the content lead at Opkey. She has expertise in writing technical content focused around ERP testing, Cloud apps, automation and other IT related topics. She has rich experience in writing content for marketing collateral like whitepapers, case studies, newsletters etc. which helps in funnel creation for sales.