Lanes: test before production

Changing a claim type, a field rule or a status on the system your dealers use every day is risky. Fleetlane lets you make those changes in a lane first: a test copy of your configuration, with its own data, its own people and its own connected systems. When the change works, you preview it and promote it into production in one step, or throw it away.

Lanes live inside your one Fleetlane workspace. There is no second “test company” to set up, keep in step or copy back from.

Production and test lanes

Every workspace has a production lane, where live work happens, and as many test lanes as you need, for example Test and Staging. Lanes are listed in Settings › Lanes in the order changes travel: each lane promotes into the next one, and production is always last.

A test lane has its own address: your workspace address followed by /~ and the lane’s code, such as /~test. The lane picker shows which lane you are in and switches between the lanes you have access to; switching reloads the page in the other lane.

What a new lane starts with

• Your configuration, unchanged. A new lane starts with production’s claim types, statuses, code lists, custom fields, field rules, templates, warranty profiles, service definitions and roles. It only differs from production where you change it.
• Your workspace settings, such as currency and branding.
• Optionally, a sample of your real data. Tick Copy a sample from production and the lane receives the last 100 vehicles with their claims, plus the vehicles of the last 100 claims, with what they need: dealerships, partners, models, parts, claim lines, versions, attachments and discussions. Production stays as it is, and nothing is sent to your lifecycle engine or your webhooks while the sample is copied.
• No connected systems. You connect the lane to its own test systems (below).

Each lane keeps its own vehicles, claims, dealers and partners. Records created in a test lane never appear in production, and claim and vehicle numbers in a test lane count on their own, so testing never uses up production numbers.

Each lane has its own systems

A test lane connects to test copies of your other systems, never to the live ones:

• Your ERP: the lane’s own connection, usually to a test copy of your ERP, so a test claim never posts to your live ERP.
• The lifecycle engine: the lane is paired with a non-production lane of the engine. Production is paired only with the engine’s production lane; Fleetlane and the engine both refuse to pair production with a test lane, either way round.
• Webhooks and API keys: set up per lane. A test lane’s events go only to the webhooks set up in that lane, and an API key works only in the lane it was created in.

flowchart LR
  subgraph FL["Your Fleetlane workspace"]
    P["Production lane"]
    T["Test lane"]
  end
  P <--> EP["Lifecycle engine<br/>production"]
  P <--> RP[("Your ERP<br/>live")]
  T <--> ET["Lifecycle engine<br/>test lane"]
  T <--> RT[("Your ERP<br/>test copy")]

Strict access per lane

Being able to sign in to your workspace does not let anyone into a test lane. To work in a lane, a person needs both:

• the Work in lanes permission, and
• a role in that lane, granted under Settings › Lanes › Lane access. A dealer role is granted together with the dealership it belongs to in that lane.

Access to production is managed under Users & Roles, as before. Nobody is copied into a new lane except the person who created it.

Who	Can
Fleetlane configurator	Change configuration in the lanes where they hold the role. Cannot promote
Lane manager	Create, order, rename and delete lanes, grant lane access, preview, promote and discard (Manage lanes)
Head office admin	Both of the above

How to work with lanes

flowchart TB
  C["Create a lane<br/>your configuration,<br/>optional sample of data"] --> A["Give people access<br/>a role in the lane"]
  A --> W["Connect its systems<br/>test ERP, test lifecycle lane"]
  W --> E["Change configuration<br/>and try it on the lane's data"]
  E --> V{"Preview"}
  V -->|"conflicts"| E
  V -->|"looks right"| P["Promote<br/>into the next lane"]
  V -->|"not wanted"| D["Discard<br/>all changes, or some"]
  P --> L["Live in production"]

1. Create a lane in Settings › Lanes, with or without a sample of production data.
2. Give people access: the configurators and testers who will work there, and test dealer users if dealers should try it.
3. Connect its systems from Settings inside the lane: its ERP connection and its lifecycle engine pairing. Then register the sample’s records with the lifecycle engine.
4. Change configuration in the lane and work real cases through it: raise claims, run lifecycle actions, check field rules for each role.
5. Preview the promotion. Fleetlane lists, area by area, what is new, changed and deleted, and any conflicts. A conflict is something that changed in production after the lane copied it; you resolve it before promoting.
6. Promote or discard:
   • Promotion is all or nothing: either every change applies, or none does. Changes are applied in place, so live claims and vehicles keep their statuses, and people keep their roles.
   • Discard removes the lane’s changes, all of them or the ones you pick. Production is untouched.

Only configuration is promoted. Data never moves between lanes: test claims stay in the test lane.

When a test system is rebuilt

Test copies of an ERP are sometimes rebuilt from scratch. Records in the lane may then point at documents that no longer exist. The test records concerned are removed from the lane, and dealers and material types are sent to the rebuilt system again. As a last resort the lane is deleted and created again from a fresh sample; promote or note any configuration changes first, because deleting a lane removes everything it holds.