Welcome to the section dedicated to the Power Customer Advisory Team (Power CAT)! We are part of the Microsoft Power Platform engineering team, and our mission is to ensure the success of our key enterprise customers with the Power Platform. Let’s dive into who we are, what we do, and how we interact with various roles to help people be successful, especially in the context of automated testing.
We are a diverse group of technical architects, community managers, program managers, developers, and content creators, located all over the world. Our shared passion for the possibilities of low-code drives us to work closely with a specific group of key enterprise customers, doing whatever it takes to ensure their success with the Power Platform.
The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit has evolved over 4 years. It includes a wide range of components of the Power Platform, which is a suite of applications, connectors, and a data platform (Dataverse) that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.
As shown in CoE Kit Automated Test we have many components of our end to end solution to test including:
Power Apps: These are applications built using the Power Platform. There are two types of Power Apps included in the CoE Starter Kit:
Power Automate Cloud Flows: Power Automate is a service that helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more. Cloud Flows are workflows that run in the cloud and can be triggered by various events, such as new environments being added to Dataverse after calling Administration connectors.
Dataverse: Dataverse the scalable data service and app platform that we used to securely store and manage inventory and usage data used by the kit. It provides a common data model that allows you to integrate data from multiple sources and create a unified view of your business.
Creator Kit: The Creator Kit is a set of tools and components that help you build custom user interfaces in Power Apps. It makes use of PCF (PowerApps Component Framework), which allows developers to create reusable components using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These components can be used to enhance the functionality and appearance of your Power Apps.
Given the complexity and wide range of components included in the CoE Starter Kit, automated testing is essential to ensure the quality and reliability of the solution. The CoE Starter Kit is used by thousands of customers globally and needs to be updated frequently to incorporate new product features. Additionally, it needs to be tested across many geographies around the world to ensure consistent performance and reliability.
Automated testing helps in:
By leveraging automated testing, the CoE Starter Kit can maintain its high standards of quality and continue to meet the needs of its global user base.
The following examples could be of interest based on how the CoE Starter Kit is applying test Automation.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| CoE Starter Kit Test Automation ALM | The CoE Starter Kit Test Automation ALM aims to maintain quality and reduce manual effort for new releases by automating the release and continuous deployment process. This involves using tools like Power Automate Desktop, Terraform, and the Test Engine to provision environments, install dependencies, and validate setups, ensuring consistent and reliable operations. |
| CoE Starter Kit - Infrastructure As Code | The combination of Terraform and the CoE Starter Kit offers a robust solution for managing Power Platform environments by leveraging infrastructure as code to ensure consistency and reliability. This approach simplifies the setup and maintenance of environments, allowing us to create the foundations of an automated test matrix to test setup and upgrade process. |
| CoE Starter Kit Power Automate Testing | The CoE Starter Kit Power Automate Testing feature is in the early stages of planning and aims to address the needs of users building and deploying Power Automate Cloud flows. Proper testing of these flows is crucial for maintaining accurate data collection and reporting, which supports better decision-making and governance within the organization |
As we engage with various roles across the spectrum to ensure their success and provide feedback to Microsoft Engineering teams on the importance of automated testing for each role:
Power CAT produces a wealth of resources to guide our customers through their digital transformation with Microsoft Power Platform. These resources are based on our experiences and expertise from working with customers and are designed to help you succeed.
The Power Platform Well-Architected framework is a set of best practices, architecture guidance, and review tools. It helps you make informed decisions about the design, planning, and implementation of modern application workloads with Microsoft Power Platform.
Microsoft Power Platform Guidance provides valuable information to help you create and implement the business and technology strategies necessary to succeed with the Power Platform.
For customers working with Power CAT we help them jumpstart your Microsoft Power Platform adoption journey with our workbook, maturity model, and best practices. These resources can help you shape technology, business, and people strategies to drive desired business outcomes for your adoption effort.
We contribute blog posts that cover a wide range of topics and areas of interest on the official Power Platform, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Pages blogs.
The Microsoft Power Up Program is designed for career switchers. It enables non-tech professionals to successfully transition into a new career path in low-code application development using Microsoft Power Platform. As we expand into Enterprise delivery of this program the role of Automated Testing is a an area that could be considered.
Power CAT produces numerous tools to guide our customers to success with Microsoft Power Platform in their digital transformation. These tools are created based on our experiences and expertise from working with customers.
The Power CAT Engineering tools team works in close collaboration with the Power Apps Test Engine team as an early adopter and contributor to low-code automated testing.
Explore our collection of Microsoft Power CAT tools videos, tutorials, demos, and more. These resources are designed to help you get the most out of the Power Platform and achieve your goals.