Major Business Central update: get ready with regression testing

What to expect from the upcoming major Business Central update

For its latest version of Business Central (BC26 or BC 2025 release wave 1), Microsoft has promised an impressive list of new features and major changes that can impact users’ systems.

MS prioritized AI/Copilot possibilities for multiple BC modules. The users will soon employ more useful AI functionality like automated creation of sales orders from emails or summarizing records in concise bullet points.

Other Business Central updates promise to enhance user experience and AL development flexibility.

• For improved clarity, users will be able to select concrete options from the lists of allowed languages per environment.

• Enhanced Power BI reports contribute to better use of business data for decision making.

• AL development gets a boost with features previously unavailable for the cloud (like moving tables and fields across partners’ extensions), and so much more.

This release promises the availability of sandbox testing, a groundbreaking feature that will help users prepare for major updates.

In the meantime, MS is permanently deleting 150 obsolete tables to clean up the app code. This actually makes a significant number and a real impact on custom integrations.

We have highlighted only a handful of the upcoming updates for Business Central. But these are enough to make your customers honestly ask themselves: are we ready for breaking changes?

Many of the upcoming changes could highly likely break integrations, custom solutions, and unique workflows. Removing that many standard tables and the extensive use of AI automation may lead to system conflicts.

Early regression testing, in turn, helps avoid broken processes and expensive fixes when the changes from Microsoft roll out.

Let's explore how we can help your customers prepare for painless updates with effective regression testing.

What to prioritize for regression testing before the new BC release

First of all, make sure you are effectively managing updates on all your environments.

We are using the Tenant Admin Tool to schedule Business Central and add-ons updates accordingly to different environments. Tenant Admin Tool helps effectively administer multiple tenants without disrupting business operations.

Next, keep in mind that different modules and functionalities of Business Central are more vulnerable to update issues than others. Heavily customized systems with multiple extensions, custom processes, and integrations face the highest risk.

To remain alert and avoid any problems new features could bring, we suggest concentrating on the BC areas that are first-priority for regression testing:

With early regression testing for these first-priority areas as well as for other BC areas that are in use, businesses can find and resolve critical issues with minimal downtime and smooth adoption of the new BC features.

Regression testing helps prevent Business Central update failures

Why regression testing is so critical

When MS pushes a set of updates, customized code/extensions in BC may fail.

As part of the Microsoft Dynamics community, you focus on helping your customers easily adopt and benefit from the new features Microsoft promised for the latest version of Business Central. This involves verifying that customers’ setups fit with the new version and are stable as the updates become available.

Regression testing becomes crucial here. It verifies the existing functionality to ensure that the upcoming changes do not break it, and the BC system performs as needed after the updates.

In either cloud or on-prem versions, regression testing finds potential issues before they grow into major problems and affect business with errors and delays. As a result, businesses can avoid service interruptions which, according to Forbes, may cost $9.000 per minute for large organizations.

With the potential risks in mind, knowing when to run regression testing is important.

When regression testing should be conducted

Regression testing – manual or automated regression testing – should be run before the BC update release as well as when changes are applied to code.

Test automation is crucial at any stage and works great with large projects. Running it regularly or on demand is up to you, as many times as needed. Test automation is a mandatory investment that proves to be a reliable asset when time is limited and the scope is huge. Test automation helps identify major or minor issues in a very short time.

Automated regression testing for Business Central includes:

• developing and running BC Test Codeunits to verify AL customization code.

• using Playwright framework: for complex system integrations where Business Central is integrated with third-party systems to cover end-to-end functional and non-functional tests, for cross-systems scenarios that manual QA engineers or users execute.

How we support customers in getting ready for changes through regression testing

In quality assurance, structure is vital.

That is why we practice a structured approach to helping our customers support their customers when the updates from Microsoft are on the way.

As best practices for quality assurance, we have a roadmap for regression testing so we can actively manage their readiness for the BC updates.


In a nutshell, our Update Readiness Roadmap is as follows:

• Sharing the update schedule. We regularly inform our customers about the BC release schedules and mandatory updates and remind cloud users to test in a sandbox before the updates roll out.
  
  
• Reviewing customizations and creating test scenarios. We review customer-specific customizations most prone to breaking and verify that customers’ extensions are compatible with the latest version of Business Central.
  
  
• Prioritizing regression testing for vulnerable BC areas as mentioned above.
  
  
• Using automated testing. We recommend reusing automated regression testing to improve test coverage for frequent updates and reduce future spending.
  
  
• Monitoring upcoming deprecations and removals. To keep systems stable, we track the features/tables Microsoft drops and plan updates or replacements for any impacted components.
  
  
• Offering post-update support. We quickly address critical errors and constantly monitor and tackle performance issues after updates.