How to Survive Microsoft's 8 Updates Per Year: A D365 Regression Testing Playbook

Microsoft's continuous update model for Dynamics 365 is both a blessing and a challenge.

On one hand, you get regular feature improvements, security patches, and platform enhancements without the pain of major version upgrades. On the other hand, your team now faces a relentless testing cycle that never really ends.

Between wave releases, monthly updates, and hotfixes, D365 Finance and Operations environments can see eight or more updates annually. Each update carries the potential to break customisations, disrupt integrations, or introduce unexpected behaviour in business-critical processes.

Most D365 teams respond to this reality in one of two ways: they either skip thorough regression testing and accept the risk, or they burn out their functional consultants on manual validation cycles that consume weeks of effort.

Neither approach is sustainable. This guide offers a practical framework for handling continuous updates without sacrificing quality or exhausting your team.

Understanding the D365 Update Calendar

Before building a testing strategy, it helps to understand what you are actually dealing with.

Wave Releases (2 per year) Microsoft delivers two major wave releases annually, typically in April and October. These include significant new features, UI changes, and platform capabilities. Wave releases are announced months in advance and include preview periods for testing.

Monthly Updates Between wave releases, Microsoft pushes monthly service updates containing bug fixes, minor enhancements, and security patches. These are generally lower risk than wave releases but can still affect customisations and integrations.

Hotfixes and Emergency Patches Occasionally, Microsoft releases out-of-band patches to address critical issues. These require rapid assessment and deployment.

ISV and Extension Updates If you run third-party solutions or ISV extensions, those vendors also push updates on their own schedules. An ISV update landing the same week as a Microsoft update can create compound testing requirements.

The cumulative effect is that your D365 environment is never truly static. Testing is not a phase that ends at go-live; it is an ongoing operational requirement.

The Testing Triage Matrix

Not every update requires the same level of testing rigour. The key is matching your testing effort to the actual risk profile of each update type.

Wave Releases: Full Regression Wave releases warrant comprehensive regression testing. Microsoft publishes detailed release notes and preview environments, giving you time to prepare. Plan for a full regression cycle covering all critical business processes, integrations, and customisations.

Monthly Updates: Targeted Regression Monthly updates typically require targeted testing focused on areas Microsoft identifies as changed, plus your highest-risk customisations and integrations. A full regression cycle is usually overkill unless the release notes flag significant changes to areas you depend on.

Hotfixes: Smoke Testing Plus Affected Areas Emergency patches require rapid smoke testing of core functionality plus focused testing on whatever the patch addresses. Speed matters here, so having automation ready to run immediately is essential.

ISV Updates: Integration-Focused Testing When your ISV vendors push updates, focus testing on the integration points between their solution and your D365 environment. Validate data flows, process handoffs, and any customisations that touch the ISV functionality.

The "Must Automate" List

Certain D365 processes should never be validated manually. These are the critical paths where failures have immediate business impact and where manual testing is too slow to keep pace with update frequency.

Finance and Operations Core Flows

Order-to-Cash: Sales order creation through invoice posting and payment application. This is revenue recognition, so failures here are visible immediately.

Procure-to-Pay: Purchase requisition through vendor payment. Failures disrupt supplier relationships and can halt operations.

Inventory Transactions: Adjustments, transfers, and counting processes that affect stock accuracy and costing.

Month-End Close: Journal entries, allocations, period close procedures, and financial reporting. Failures here delay financial statements.

Intercompany Transactions: If you run multiple legal entities, intercompany processes are notoriously fragile and must be validated after every update.

Integration Points

Any integration with external systems (banks, EDI partners, reporting platforms) should be automated. These are the places where D365 changes most frequently cause unexpected failures.

Power Platform connections, particularly Power Automate flows triggered by D365 events, should be validated regularly. Microsoft updates both platforms, and changes to either side can break the integration.

Custom Workflows and Extensions

Any customisation that modifies standard D365 behaviour is a candidate for automation. Microsoft's updates assume standard functionality; your customisations do not get the same level of pre-release testing from Microsoft.

Building Your Regression Suite: The LEGO Approach

Here is where traditional test automation falls apart for most D365 teams.

Building a comprehensive regression suite from scratch takes months. By the time you finish building automation for your current environment, Microsoft has already pushed updates that require you to update your tests. It becomes a treadmill you can never exit.

A more practical approach treats test automation like LEGO blocks rather than custom sculptures.

Think about it this way: Order-to-Cash in D365 follows a predictable pattern. Sales order creation, confirmation, picking, packing, shipping, invoicing, payment. The screens are standard. The workflow is standard. The validation points are standard.

Instead of building Order-to-Cash automation from scratch for your environment, you start with pre-built blocks that handle the standard process. You then snap on additional blocks for your specific configurations: custom fields, modified approval workflows, integration callouts.

The same logic applies across all D365 modules. Procure-to-Pay has standard blocks. Inventory management has standard blocks. Month-end close has standard blocks. Your testing effort focuses on configuring and extending these blocks rather than building everything from zero.

This approach dramatically compresses the time from "we need regression automation" to "we are running regression automation." Instead of a four-month build cycle, you are running meaningful tests within days.

Enabling Your Functional Consultants

One of the persistent challenges with D365 test automation is the skills gap. Your functional consultants understand the business processes deeply, but most lack the coding skills that traditional automation tools require.

This creates an awkward dynamic. The people who know what to test cannot build the automation. The people who can build automation do not understand the business context. Knowledge transfer between these groups is slow and error-prone.

Modern test automation platforms address this by allowing tests to be authored in natural language rather than code. A functional consultant can write a test step like "Navigate to Sales Orders and create a new order for customer Contoso" and the system translates that into executable automation.

This is not just a convenience feature. It fundamentally changes who can participate in building and maintaining your test suite. Your functional consultants become direct contributors rather than requirements providers waiting for technical resources to implement their requests.

The shift matters particularly in the context of continuous updates. When your functional team can modify and extend tests themselves, you respond to update cycles faster. You do not wait for developer availability to address testing needs.

The Self-Healing Requirement

Any discussion of D365 test automation must address the maintenance problem honestly.

D365's continuous update model means your application changes frequently. Microsoft updates UI elements, rearranges screens, modifies navigation paths, and introduces new controls. Traditional test automation built on rigid element locators breaks every time these changes occur.

If you build a regression suite of 500 tests and 20 percent break after each wave release, you are looking at 100 tests requiring manual repair twice per year. That maintenance burden often exceeds the effort of just running manual tests, which is why many D365 automation initiatives eventually get abandoned.

Self-healing automation addresses this by using machine learning to understand the intent of each test step rather than just the mechanical actions. When Microsoft moves a button or renames a field, the system recognises what the test is trying to accomplish and finds the updated path automatically.

This is not a minor enhancement. It is the capability that makes sustained D365 test automation viable. Without self-healing, your regression suite degrades with every update cycle until maintenance costs overwhelm the benefits.

A Practical Timeline for Wave Releases

Here is a suggested approach for handling Microsoft's wave releases, assuming you have automation in place:

Eight Weeks Before Release Review Microsoft's release notes and identify features affecting your environment. Flag any changes to modules you have customised or integrated. Begin updating test data and scenarios if new functionality requires coverage.

Four Weeks Before Release Deploy the preview release to your sandbox environment. Run your automated regression suite against the preview. Identify failures and categorise them: actual bugs versus expected changes requiring test updates.

Two Weeks Before Release Complete any test modifications required for the new release. Run full regression again to confirm stability. Escalate any actual bugs discovered to Microsoft support if they affect your go-live.

Release Week Apply the update to your production environment during your standard maintenance window. Run smoke tests immediately post-deployment. Run full regression overnight or over the weekend. Review results Monday morning and address any failures.

Post-Release Document any issues encountered for future reference. Update your testing runbook if you discover gaps. Capture lessons learned while they are fresh.

Getting Started

If you currently lack D365 test automation, the prospect of building comprehensive coverage can feel overwhelming. The key is starting with your highest-risk processes rather than attempting to automate everything at once.

Identify your top five critical business processes. These are typically: Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, a key manufacturing or service delivery workflow, month-end close, and your most important integration.

Build or deploy automation for these five processes first. Run them against your next update cycle. Measure the time savings compared to manual testing. Use that data to justify expanding coverage.

The goal is not perfection on day one. The goal is establishing a foundation that grows more valuable with each update cycle, compounding your return over time.

Virtuoso's composable test automation for Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes pre-built test components covering Finance and Operations, Supply Chain Management, Sales, Customer Service, and Project Operations. With natural language test authoring and AI-powered self-healing, your functional consultants can build and maintain automation without coding skills. See how it works.