The PKB Sandbox environment is designed to provide a safe, controlled space for experimenting, validating changes, and testing new features before they are released to production. This guidance outlines best practices, expectations, and considerations for working within Sandbox to ensure consistent, reliable, and effective testing.

Recommendations

By following these recommendations, teams can minimise risks, improve test accuracy, and maintain alignment across environments.

• Anyone developing an integration with PKB using our APIs will need to provide their own testing resource. PKB will provide support and guidance but can only sign off development from a technical perspective of the APIs being used correctly. PKB does not act as integration feed UAT testers on behalf of our customers and partners.

• PKB is reluctant to support integration technical development (beyond connectivity testing and links to documentation) until scoping and configuration has been signed off as complete for a feed or workflow.

• PKB requires all organisations that are sending data to PKB to perform Visual Quality Assurance (checking the UI to ensure that all data is displaying as expected) on sandbox - https://sandbox.patientsknowbest.com/

• Please do not use patient identifiable production data on non-production PKB instances.

  • For example, PKB Sandbox will expect any NHS number to fall within the valid test range and comply to NHS number standards. You can find more details on valid test range numbers here.

• PKB will not provide production credentials until all testing has been completed and signed off by both the integrating party and PKB.

• Performance testing occurs on the relevant production server. This involves turning on production feeds for 1 hour, confirming throughput and performance meet desired thresholds then disconnecting feeds and doing a visual QA.