Understanding confidence testing

Before a production system upgrade, clients perform confidence testing on the temporary production environment to validate that the production environment is ready for a Pega Infinity upgrade. For Pega Cloud Services upgrades, confidence testing occurs within a 60-minute window. Before performing confidence testing, clients should create a test plan to run smoke tests to ensure that the run-time behavior is correct. Clients should also perform a dry-run of the test plan on the Staging stage (temporary production environment).

When you create a test plan, consider performing some of the following tests for each of your applications:

• Log in as operators in each of the primary access groups.
• Create case instances and step through a few case life cycles.
• Evaluate the accuracy of dashboard reports.
• Visually inspect each of the portals.

When you create a test plan, consider the following points:

• When you use Deployment Manager to deploy the upgrade pipeline and the deployment moves to the production stage, it:
  • Promotes rule updates, such as reports or delegated rules, to the production environment when the upgraded production environment goes live.
  • Discards updates to data or case instances in the confidence testing product rule after the upgraded production environment goes live.
• Avoid performing any updates to external systems.
• The database does not contain case or data instances, so you might want to include them in your testing package to enable report testing or case inspection.
• Agents do not run on the temporary production environment, so some functionality might not work. Consider disabling agents during a dry run to set accurate expectations.