Prevent testing email in production

Question

I'm going through some problem, that the developers are leaving the email traces in the websites deployed live. We are only knowing about it when an employee leaves and his/her email starts to bounce.

Here, for instance, Bishant just left the company & his email is deleted and now we get Mail delivery failure notifications from a website, that was deployed over 2 years ago. Normally what developers do is for testing purpose they add their email address in site configuration page or some time in code as well, which is very bad practice.

I need to make sure, that there should not be such email addresses in the system. As a QA Engineer from my side what will be the strategies to get rid of this issue in future.

Answer 1

The best and easiest way to do this kind of testing and to get rid of this issue is to have a test email ID like '[email protected]', and use this email ID for your and developer's testing purposes, i.e. where ever in system you need to enter the email ID use this one and proceed further, by this way your problem of mail bounce will get resolved regardless of any person is in company or not, this email ID will always remain active. Secondly, you can keep credentials of this email ID with you (QA person), Developer (Technical Lead) and PM (Project Manager), so that there are no dependency issues. In this case even if anyone of you leave the project or company then your work will go on. Remember this test email ID can be of your company or any other email provider like Gmail, yahoo etc. But for security reasons I will suggest to have test email ID of your company only this will allow better security of data. you can get one created from client as well, so that they receive such mails from production server. Another thing you must know that adding personal email ID in code and configuration is bad practice, especially when that code needs to be deployed to production server. At that time, you should highlight this issue as well. As a member of QA team you are not only responsible for bugs and testing but the overall quality and health of the project, which is being hampered by this activity. Make this part of your checklist that either you or deployment team needs to check that there is no personal email ID in application after deployment which belongs to your organization. If there is any, then replace it with your TestDemo email ID.

Answer 2

Emails and any other "magic strings" should be in configuration, and might be set differently for development, testing, and production. Even better, don't put individual emails there but mailing list. Then all members can react, and if any one member is on vacation, answer is not left in the limbo.