I keep an eye on the deprecations pages on Microsoft Learn, using this wonderful tool from Ty Corcoran. A few days ago, it sent a notification about a new entry in the Important changes (deprecations) coming in Power Platform list that I found especially interesting:
I had not used the Test Engine feature at all, given how my roles have usually been further away from the programmatic testing of applications. Yet the wording on that note is something that made me pause: “Test Engine has near-zero usage”. Wow! You rarely see honesty like that in official MS Lean pages. But it gets better:
The Power Fx implementation created unnecessary limitations that are avoided if using Playwright directly (Test Engine is built on Playwright).
The replacement for Power Apps Test Engine is a set of Power Platform Playwright Samples in a GitHub repo. There’s a comparison table that shows the reasoning for why this is a superior approach compared to the Test Engine that has been around earlier:
AI authoring is the main story here. And how the Power Fx YAML language used by Test Engine is flagged as “not supported”. That ultimately is the big threat to everything built in the past decade to enable citizen-dev friendly app development with Power Apps canvas apps.
The original promise of Power Fx
Before it (probably) gets deleted, I managed to take a screenshot of the Test Engine project’s GitHub Pages website. Specifically the page “Why Not Just Use Code First Testing Tools”.
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