RSMUS.comWritten in cooperation with William Sumner.
For the past couple of months, we have been working with Latha and the regression suite automation tool (RSAT) accelerators team to help build out the CCM Growers test plan. From helping to build out the Release Validation Plan (RVP) to creating RSAT recordings and, finally, testing and chaining the test suites all together to be tested at clients, we have experienced the RSAT Life.
For those who don’t know, RSAT, or the Regression Suite Automation Tool, was designed to be used to reduce the time consultants need to spend on manually testing a module and, instead, let RSAT perform a lot of the acceptance testing. RSM has started to build out ProShip, Grower, Trade Promotion Management and many other modules that will help our clients reduce the time and cost of D365 implementation projects.
All of the consultants on this project, including the two of us, had just completed training or other projects before beginning to work with RSAT. The only thing we all had in common at the time was that we were on the bench and wanted to keep ourselves busy.
A couple of months ago, our only experience with RSAT was listening to Latha talk about how great RSAT is and how bright the future would be when we got to work with RSAT on future projects. This introduction to RSAT came during her visit to the class we attended during our respective new hire training session. Since then, we have spent hundreds of hours working with RSAT, and we have come up with a motto for the RSAT Life: If there is a problem, then we don’t have access.
To give an example of how a typical day goes: First we log in and try to complete any outstanding tasks from yesterday, then we hop onto the daily RSAT standup call to give updates and see if we are on track. Then we spend the rest of the day making new recordings and learning more about the module we are working in. Of course, we also have a healthy dose of pestering the El Salvador team for help (shout out to Rosa, Ricardo, Mauricio, Gil, and Carlos) or teaching consultants new to RSAT on how to start using it. Yet with all that we have done with RSAT, we still have so much more to learn. As they say, learning to use RSAT is easy, mastering RSAT is hard.
For all of RSAT’s strength, it has some weaknesses. Microsoft, if you are reading this blog post, please add new features that would allow us to force stop RSAT when it is running and also include a way to allow references from other test suites to be used inside another test suite.
With all things considered, we are proud of our current accomplishments. Since we started living the RSAT life four months ago, we have (including all the other consultants) almost completed the test plan for CCM Growers and have started to send it out to consultants in the field to test it out with their client.
As 2020 slowly approaches, we know that the RSAT life won’t last forever, and we will soon onboard onto a new project. But when we return to the bench, we know the RSAT life awaits.
