I wanted to share some tips on how I go about QAing or testing a Journey Orchestrator program, as it has taken me some time to standardize my processes and identify the “best” way for my org to test our new programs before launching.
- Design your program as you believe it needs to be designed.
- Create a Clone of the program and title it TEST - [name of program]. This is the program you will use for testing.
- *Shorten any conditional wait times, wait timers, and/or reminder times to allow for quicker testing
- Use CSV import to upload yourself as a participant
- Set your Uniqueness Criteria so that “Participant with same unique criteria can enter after...” SELECT ALL participant states. This will allow you to test multiple pathways as the same participant.
- Create a QA checklist so you can test scenarios as you go. Some common checklist items for me include “Sender is sent from Sender Email” … “Email template format looks good” … “Mappings worked as expected” … “Survey link worked” … “Survey preview looks good” … “CTA was generated” and so on. Your QA checklist will look different depending on your program model and goals.
- Create separate QA checklists for each pathway. For example, if your program has conditional waits that may take a participant on a unique path based on a survey response
- When you’re ready to begin testing, you can either change your program to Active status and then sync participants, or sync participants and then change program to Active. If you sync participants first (which is just yourself through your CSV import), turning your program to Active will launch the participant on the program. If you turn your program to Active before syncing participants, you will be able to manually add yourself to the program after syncing participants.
- Run your first test with yourself as a participant. Follow one of your pathways through to completion.
- To test another pathway, re-sync participants and you will see yourself added again as another participant. Add yourself to the program to test the second pathway. To test a third pathway, repeat the steps above. Continue repeating the steps of re-syncing participants, adding yourself to a program, and completing a pathway over and over until all pathways have been tested.
- When all testing is complete, delete your TEST program.
To test participant queries, I will re-create a participant query source as a Rule (if it is more complex) or through Report Builder (if it is a simpler query).
*Edited to include Heather’s recommendation
All in all, the way you test a JO program may depend on your program model and your own individual instance configuration of Gainsight, but this is the way that I have found works for me!
