Performance & Release Waves

Two kinds of testing that don't map to a single user story, and therefore tend to fall through the cracks of a sprint-driven backlog: load behavior before go-live, and regression against platform updates that arrive on Microsoft's schedule rather than yours.

Performance testing before go-live

Plan a performance test under realistic production load as part of go-live readiness — form load times, search, and integration throughput are non-functional acceptance criteria, not things to discover in week one of production. Factor service protection limits into any load scenario that exercises integrations. See Microsoft's go-live preparation guidance.

Release wave regression

DGT-TST-060 — Microsoft ships two release waves per year that reach production environments automatically. Activate each wave's Early Access in a sandbox as soon as it is available and run a regression pass (forms, command bar, critical flows and plugins) before the wave reaches production — a wave regression discovered in production is an incident; the same regression discovered in a sandbox is a backlog item. See the release schedule.

The deprecation radar in Operations is the standing counterpart: the radar tells you what to look for, the regression run tells you whether it bites.