Creatary takes development very seriously, and in the telecoms world it can get pretty expensive to develop and test your applications. Through development of the Creatary platform itself we have needed to run testing in the traditional way to get a feel for how things work, and during the early stages we decided that it wasn't practical to expect developers to go through the process, especially when dealing with features which might only be available in another country.

The traditional approach

The 'normal' way to develop is of course to first start on your own computer, get things running conceptually, and then take the leap to real life testing. Once you get to that stage you need to pick a provider/platform to integrate to, and once you've chosen your platform you start realising that testing is either going to cost money for real text messages, or you have to use a 'test' server which responds with static data for you to test with.

Since integration with the test environment is usually a separate issue to the live network, it's quite difficult to run tests from the production system.

Creatary's approach

We think Creatary's sandbox architecture is unique. We don't differentiate our testing and production environments by different servers, we instead identify what we call sandbox 'personas' within the live environment. This means that your development process is more efficient and testing is more realistic, as you have full control over the personas, including testing errors and edge-cases to ensure your application is ready for the masses. Personas are represented as real users within your application and can interact with real users if need them too for testing.

Once you've tested your application you can it's a business issue to roll out to your desired markets, no need for further integration.

Our sandbox is constantly evolving, with new options, and soon with additional automation support to allow you to develop it into your automated build and testing processes (eg. Maven/Junit).