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Testing

Testing best practices

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All testing should be performed in our developer environment (also referred to as the demo environment). If you are participating in the Docusign ISV Referral Partner program and received an ISV partner production account, you should use this account only to manage your integration key. (IK) in our production environment, not for sending envelopes.

As an ISV partner, you should create a separate developer account to simulate a customer connecting their Docusign account to your integration. This allows for end-to-end testing of OAuth authentication, sending, signing, and status or document retrieval (if applicable).

Test your integration with different Docusign plans in your developer account to ensure operability between plan types and your customer base.

API and usage issues

Your applications must conform to the Developer Terms and Conditions and implement best practices for using the Docusign APIs, both during development and in production. For more information, see:

Proactive monitoring

Your company should proactively monitor your application to make sure that it does not break any Docusign API access rules including API errors, exceeding API limits, etc. Your integration should provide proper error handling and messaging to the user, if limits are reached.

API limits

As discussed in the API resource limits, if your application exceeds the 3,000 API calls per hour limit, then additional API calls will be rejected until the call count resets at the top of the next hour.

Your application should track the API resource limits headers. Log and notify your customer system administrator if your application gets within 10% of the limits. Your application should automatically pause its use of the Docusign APIs to avoid being refused access and potentially losing rejected envelope requests.

Your customers can request a higher API limit for your application, but it won’t be granted if the majority of your API calls are polling requests. In this case, you must update your application to poll less frequently or switch to webhooks for obtaining status updates.

Pro tip: Plan your application to use webhooks for receiving status updates from Docusign.

Priority responses

If your application is causing issues within the Docusign system or is otherwise not conforming to the Developer Terms and Conditions, please work with the Docusign Developer Support team to understand and fix the problem. To this end, be sure to maintain an updated set of admins in the account that is managing the integration key. Besides ensuring you do not lose control over your integration key(s), this will ensure that your requests for Support services will not require further proof of authorization.

Post Go-Live

Manage your admin users in the same Docusign account that you use to manage your integration key. This should be the production account that you selected when you passed Go-Live. If you have employee turnover, update your listed administrators so you do not lose control over this account and its integration keys.

  • Consider your need for a test account for subsequent ad hoc testing, troubleshooting, and for testing ahead of new releases by Docusign.
  • Keep your memberships and administrators active and up to date on your test account(s) so that you don’t lose control of them or have to create new ones.
  • Consider leveraging automated testing to run during the two-week period when new changes are deployed in the demo environment prior to production deployment.
  • Consider setting up a test account in the demo environment for your Support team to test and troubleshoot customer issues. Also consider the same for your pre-Sales team for demonstrations.

Next steps