General Information
What are the benefits of being able to perform testing in a Production Environment?
- Changes have an immediate impact on your checking
- No more added step of waiting for Content Profiles or Targets to be moved from one server to another
- Better consistency of checking results since you’ll no longer rely on a Dev environment that may have a different configuration
How to Test Without a Sandbox
With the configurability in Acrolinx, testing is easier than ever … even in your production environment. Below are some common scenarios.
For each item below, your first step is to create a Test Target, either from scratch or by copying an existing Target.
Need to try a new configuration? Adding a new team?
- Use your Test Target to test guidelines and terms
- Restrict this Target to people tasked with testing
- Create a Content Group limited to the testing Target to keep your Analytics clean
Need to test a custom guideline?
- Use your Test Target to enable the custom guideline before enabling it in your working Targets
- Test it thoroughly to ensure it works as expected
- When you’re ready, enable the guideline in your other Targets
Need to test a bug fix?
- Though we always test our own bug fixes, we want you to feel confident that things are working as expected
- Use your Test Target and enable the guideline in question
- Test away, and enable it in your other Targets when you’re done
Need to test a Content Profile change?
- Use your new Test Target, and either use an existing Content Profile, or click the three dots to make a test copy
- Make sure your test Content Profile is named so it appears later in the alphabetical list to ensure that the right one is used for your primary content
- In the copy of the profile, go to Criteria > Advanced and limit the use of the Content Profile to your Test Target
- Remember, the Content Profile already needs to work with your content before limiting the criteria, which is why we recommend making a copy
- On the general tab, you can also make this profile Confidential so that no checking data is stored in Analytics
Need to test new terms or Terminology domains?
- Use your Test Target and add your new domain and new terms to the Words and Phrases goal
- Remember, this is Terminology so you’ll need to go to Servers and Reload All Language Configurations
- Once the configurations are reloaded, test your new terms and domains
- When testing is completed, add them to your existing Targets
If there are dedicated test users…
- Add the assigned test users to the Ignored Users list under Analytics > Administration so none of their checking data will be visible in Analytics
- If you remove those users from the Ignored Users list, their data will show up in Analytics again
When is a Sandbox still needed?
- For Targets and Cloud Migrations, we’ll continue to use Sandboxes for testing
- For customers with IT or legal requirements, we’ll provide the option to purchase hosting and maintenance of Sandbox environments
- If Services finds it necessary, we can spin up a temporary Sandbox for internal testing before deploying in Production, but this should only be done in extreme cases