The Testability Framework

With Dynamics NAV 2009 Service Pack 1, Microsoft introduced the testability framework in the platform. This enabled developers to build test scripts in C/AL to run so-called headless tests; that is, tests that do not use the user interface (UI) to execute business logic. It was a follow-up on an internal tool called the NAV Test Framework (NTF) and had been used and worked on for a couple of years already. It allowed tests to be programmed in C# and ran against the Dynamics NAV UI. It was a neat system, with a neat technical concept behind it. However, this running test against the UI was one of the major reasons for leaving NTF behind. I seem to recall that it was the major reason because accessing business logic through the UI is slow – too slow. Too slow to allow the Microsoft Dynamics NAV development team to run all their tests against the...