Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 15 Mar 2023

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From YouTube: Quality Assurance with Power Platform Pipelines using Power Apps

Description

In this 11-minute citizen developer-focused demo, Nati Turtledove delivers a QA Assessment tool using Power apps built on the Power Platform Pipeline (ALM Accelerator for Power Platform, built by the Power CAT team). The tool (simple canvas app) facilitates the successful transition from Development to QA to UAT after criteria satisfied. App includes pre-built list of checks (assessment items) to perform, by product topic. QA submission closes QA session and allows deployment into UAT environment.

his PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft Power Platform community call – March 2023, recorded on March 15, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Nati Turtledove (Cloud2) | @NatiTurts

Community Call Conversation
• https://aka.ms/Mar15-Demo3

Supporting materials
• Article - Quality Assurance Assessment Solution | https://www.nati-turtledove.com/2023/02/28/quality-assurance-assessment-solution/
• Sample - PowerApps Quality Assurance Assessment Solution | https://github.com/NatiTurts/PowerApps_Quality_Assurance_Assessment
• Article - Introducing the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform | https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/introducing-the-alm-accelerator-for-power-platform/
• Article - Overview of pipelines in Power Platform | https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/alm/pipelines
• Article - Pipelines in Power Platform is Generally Available (GA) | https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/pipelines-in-power-platform-is-generally-available-ga/

Stay connected
• Twitter https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
• Call attention to your great work by using #PowerAppsCC and #PnPWeekly on Twitter.

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog - https://aka.ms/community/blog

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Assessment tool using powerapps that was built on top of the Power Platform pipeline before we get into it just a bit about me. My name is I, actually live in Cape Town and I've, been developing in the Power Platform for close to six years now, and I've got a true passion for the Microsoft Power Platform stack and I, just love, making Solutions and helping out uh communities and establishments uh better their processes through the platform, but specifically about the the project that I worked on the idea.

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Qa assessments, the idea came from the alien accelerator by the power cat team and, if you've ever used, the element. Accelerator you'd know that when you deploy your solutions to your various environments, you've got the ability to identify what environments you better use for the solution based on their profile and the issue I had with that is: okay, so I'm deploying from my Dev environment to QA and then to uat.

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But how can I validate my solution during that QA phase to make sure that it's ready to go to that uat, because in that uat stage we're not actually deploying the solution? We're just simply merging a pull request. So I wanted to focus specifically on these three phases, from Dev to QA, to uat and following our Dev environment. I wanted to show that we can get to our QA environment in a stable manner, using either the LM accelerator or the deployment pipelines.

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But I wanted to hold the solution there to make sure that it was ready to go through to uat when the wind developer was ready and that's where I wanted to stop a solution in place in that QA stage to ensure that when we're ready, we can go through to a successful u80 environment.

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And that's where we have the QA assessment tool and, as you can see, it looks very, very similar to the alien accelerator. That's because the idea came from the element accelerator, however, highlighting entertainment and Hugo said at the beginning. The first issue I had when an idea came to mind, and this was inspired by attending those. uh A first contributor sessions is how do I share this with the community. How can I make sure everyone can use it if I build the solution in the alien accelerator itself?

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A it's difficult to share with everyone and B when releases are updates, are released. How do I manage recreating it and embedding it into the solution? So I decided decided to start a bit quicker over a bit simpler and work with Power Platform pipelines, because it will be coming available very, very soon and the reason I tackled it from this perspective was because the Power Platform pipeline solution is built on database tables.

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Specifically the deployment stage runs table and when we create our pipelines in in the solution itself, we have to identify all our developer environments, such as our development environment, our QA uat and our product environment and we're using our environmental IDs in the solution. So I thought. Okay, if I can retrieve those IDs from their Power Platform pipelines, database tables and then reference that to its state runs.

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Maybe we can actually work something out and Link the two together and show what Solutions are selling in that QA stage and that's exactly what I did I was able to reference those tables and bring all the solutions that were deployed to a QA stage into a canvas app and then allow us to create a QA session um with all the current versioning, the the deploy developers, the deployed dates and times and and all that information, alongside of it so I'm going to quickly do a demo on this version as well and before diving into the actual solution itself, we're going to deploy a brand new solution to our QA environment using the Pipelines there we go okay, awesome, so we're going to deploy it to our accurate environment.

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I'll take a couple of seconds, but we're going to enter our variable for that purpose and then deploy version one. So, while that's deploying let's head over to our assessment app, so it's a simple canvas app and, as you can see, we've got all our solutions that are sitting within a QA stage, either currently within QA. Where but he's gone past.

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The QA stage itself and we've got quite a few: we've got a budget clock components Etc and within each app we can see what version is currently sitting on is the latest version when it was deployed to QA and who created as well now for existing solutions that have undergone um our QA assessment.

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We can also identify what the systems have been complete, what haven't been complete and what needed to undergo a a new solution assessment as well, but in order to create this Edition, we need some sort of categorized items to to spar solution again. So if we head over to our manage items, we've got a pre-built list of all the checks within a plan. The solution, ranging from different categories such as power, apps or pods power bi and at each Cadet we've got a set of topics that we want to look into.

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I.E accessibility, standards, um naming conventions have we applied monitoring performance reviews, and if you want to edit all these items, we can add descriptions. It can be, and this all looks a little database. We can delete them as well and we create can create new items into existing categories for new categories and manage those categories going forward as well. So we can always reuse the same assessment items.

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So, let's see if our solution has deployed, it is still deploying, while still deploying we're going to look at a existing solution. So if we go to our kpi management, we can see our previous assessments that we launched notice. If we click on the look um history icon there, it will take us to previous assessments, hosted on our kpi managed tool, and you can see we've done it for version 2 and version three.

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And if you look carefully back at other screen, we've got version four, actually ready for a new review and at the same time we can actually see when the review was complete uh at status as well and who the reviewer was so right. Now, I'm, the one that reviewed it and I was developer as well, and the results of our assessment was we completed it and our total score from the solution was 86.

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So it was a pause, whereas with version 1.0.0.3 it was a fine and if we want to go to the specific details, we can even expand on every single individual item and review the outcome from that assessment on an item level, so one Constitution is still deploying there. We go to the deployed success tree I'm just going to quickly refresh because I had a few issues that I was talking earlier, but our solution should make its way into our QA environment.

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Now and it's interesting enough, so you can see our pnb demo Solutions over here sitting at version one and it was deployed today if I am quite far ahead of you guys. But if you go and say create a new review, we can actually select the specific categories that we want to review um our assessment against. So, for instance, this is a simple canvas app with a few database tables, we'll select our dataverse powerapps and it's in a solution as well. We can type in any additional notes.

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It can be assign a review date and we can even assign it to other developers as well. So if we enter any usernames, we can add them there, and this will then go ahead and create the solution assessment for our specific solution. Now, when we're in our solution, oh there seems to be a slight little bug.

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Let's get back into it, we can see all our categories, for the assessment have come up as well. We can view them by all specific category and actually search them as well, and when conducting the assessment uh per category item, we can provide any feedback rated from a one to three one being bad three being terrible.

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If you want to pass an individual item, we can do as well and if we want to add additional items to the specific category that we don't really want in our general item list, we can add them over here as well and scroll them accordingly and remove them as well.

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If you need B now we can submit, we can save the assessment for future references as well, if you're not ready to submit it yet, but when you are ready to submit it, and we can then create our solution now, the way it works is because we've got a score ranging from one to three.

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We are summing up the total amount of items in this assessment and multiplying it by three to get an overall score so because we've got 34 checklist items within this assessment we are creating our solution against the total score of 122 points. So right now, based on the score I've given for one item, we've listed it at a two.

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If I try to submit my total score, points is sending it to giving it a 1.97 rating, which is not so great, but if I were to say put it at 95, we can see it sets it to 93. We can say pass and give additional feedback if need be, and when ready, we can submit the QA as well, and this will close off our uh QA session for our specific solution, allowing us to now deploy to our uat environment, and we can see it says the previous version now complete.

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If you go into our history, we can see that it was completed by myself and I was a developer with our score rates and our individual items over here for that specific solution.

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So that counter covers the solution itself.

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So what's to come so because our kind of preempting made this division based on the alien accelerator, I want to also accommodate the ability to have multiple QA environments, and that being said, with Power Platform pythons as well.

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If you want to have quite a few uh pipelines, you may have various QA environments, so I wanted to have that choice, to be able to filter to various environments and apply um these assessments based on these environments and also want to include some automation to notify assessors when they've been assigned to qas to notify developers when it's been complete, Etc and additional security. So only specific individuals can see related assessment details or can submit the sessions going forward.

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Now, because this was inspired by the accelerator, the Aon accelerates are and pushing really hard to try to get an Alm accelerator version out as well, which will hopefully be coming into the coming weeks and, alongside with the new announcement of PPP for the PowerPoint python, it's just so much easier to say that way, um coming into GA they're, quite a new.

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Quite some new features coming to Powerpuff and pipelines that I wish to integrate with the solutions, such as having preemptive approvals to Auto, deploy the solution when uh either progressed a QA assessment as a successful assessment to then go through to uat and ensuring the extensibility features uh to have after actions and before actions during our deployment phases with the QA assessment.

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So if you want to give the assessment a download it's sitting on the Microsoft adoption sample site, as well as the Microsoft um pkmp, Community GitHub, repo and I'll, leave that on for a few seconds for everyone to scan if need be, but other than that. That's been me. If you want to reach out a lovely version of the community, you can scan my QR code over there. That will take you to my LinkedIn to my website, to my blog and anything else, so yeah.

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Thank you so much for letting me present to you guys, awesome! Thank you. Nettie! That's fantastic stuff, foreign foreign.