How to Create Test Users in Your Test Environment

Most Scilife workflows involve several roles: an author, one or more reviewers, QA, an approver. 

During onboarding, you may want to run a complete cycle on your own to test how they work and appear, rather than waiting for multiple users to approve items in a test workflow. 

The way to do that is to create a few different test users in your Test environment, which you can log into for each.

It is also useful to view different workflows and scenarios in the different Scilife permission flows, and creating different test users can be useful for this purpose too.

Steps

1. In your Test environment (yourcompany-test.scilife.io), go to Settings > Users and create a new user as you normally would. See How can I create a New User?.
2. Give the user a dummy email address instead of a real one, for example: test.reviewer@yourcompany.com. The address needs to look valid, but nobody has to receive mail to the account.
3. Turn OFF email notifications for this user, so the system does not try to send anything to that address.
4. Send the login credentials to yourself. You will use them to log in as the test user and act in that role.

Good to know

• Do this in the Test environment only. Test has no user limit and is meant exactly for this. Do not create dummy users in Production: they would appear in your audit trail and count towards your licensed users.
• Users in your Validation environment are not billable, but as this environment is to be used to validate Scilife, we recommend not using it for general testing purposes.
• Use a consistent naming convention, such as "Test Reviewer" or "Test QA", so the accounts are easy to find later.
• In Scilife, the same person can be both Reviewer and QA on a document (depending on your settings), so often one test user is enough to move a document through its whole workflow.
• When you no longer need a test user, deactivate it rather than deleting it. See How can I deactivate a User? and What is the difference between a Deactivated User and a Deleted User?.