Testing Advanced Outreaches

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Hello All! Hoping to open up some discussion regarding testing advanced outreaches. I will add my ideas below but feel free to provide your feedback as well.





One major thing that would benefit Advanced Outreaches is a better way to test the flow of the whole thing.





One idea would be to be able to select an AO participant and test for them similar to in regular outreaches where it sends you the email as if it were going to the contact. This will allow you to be able to test an advanced outreach and then use it live later.





Testing is obviously easier when you are loading participants via a CSV or power list since you can modify the power list to find a test contact but sometimes when you are using something more advanced like a bionic query it is hard to set up the test since you may be pulling from multiple objects and doing transformations or maybe it is just too time consuming. With this idea, you could select one participant that is loaded and test the flow.





Another idea to help see which contacts are coming into the participants would be to perform somewhat of a "ghost" test over a period of time with a bionic query. The idea being that you set up a bionic query that will add participants and you get a list of who gets added and when, so you can review in somewhat of a sandbox environment.





Bottomline is that I feel like there could be some things added to Advanced Outreaches that help with testing. Right now, the only way to test is to set up a new advanced outreach and test with a test contact.
How to Test an Advanced Outreach 





Came across this on another article. Hope it helps
Thanks, Alex for starting this thread. I have been trying to test a created AO, going all the through to publishing but then realized it did not work. It would be great if we have diagnostics associated to see where the errors are.
I'm running into the same limitation, Alex, with untestability of the Bionic Query. In trying to view my participants, I'm getting an error that I have no participants (https://cl.ly/0G0v3e3B3A0g), even though I've set the participants to refresh daily. (Maybe it doesn't refresh for Outreaches in Draft status?)





My Bionic Query has 5 Tasks that I'd rather not reproduce in a Rule just so I can view what it's doing.
Agreeing with Seth, that the "Bionic" functions are tricky to troubleshoot because it's hard to troubleshoot see the intermediate activities for most things "Bionic". Any tools or logs to somehow see the pieces of the rule as they execute would be very welcome!
Seth, Matt,


I agree with you regarding the lack of an audit trail regarding participant lists created via Query Builder. One of the most obvious oversights with Query builder is the lack of a rules engine like run history. Being that Query builder is essentially the rules engine by another name, I think that it would be GREATLY helpful if you were able to pull query, merge and final query results from the AO participant setup, as well as view the run history for your query builder query (like you get in the rules summary).





I have started testing my bionic participant queries in the rules engine (with no actions) to test the results of both my individual and merged query sets - this allows me access to all of the features that I mentioned above. I realize that it is an extra step, but it provides a way to check the performance of a participant query before you set it up, and test its performance while it is active within an outreach.





Is this something that might be a helpful addition?
Hi Dan,


Tell me just a bit more -- by "addition", do you mean the addition of a feature to copy an AO Bionic Query into a blank Rule?
I'm probably thinking similar to Seth. Having to re-generate a query between a Bionic Rule and an AO is a recipe for missing an element, field, step or some other component which renders the testing less complete. Being able to copy them more thoroughly satisfies the testing requirement.
Hi,





We are providing with the option of doing a Preview of the query results created in AO as part of June release. This should help you to configure and check whether the query is bringing in the right results or not.





Test Run is a little further off but it is there in the roadmap.





Thanks


Abhishek S
I'll second this request (or third or whatever I am). The preview of the individual query results is a great first step, but I really need a preview of the results of the "Merges". I've got multiple sequential merges in a AO, and it never fails that I get the whole thing built and have zero results for participants, and it's usually a simple fix in that I've got the wrong field in one of the merges, but trying to trouble-shoot is nearly impossible. I end up either copying the AO to deconstruct it one merge at a time, or re-creating the whole thing in a bionic rule like Matthew is doing.