Deployment, Channels and Environment Management
What this domain tests
This domain tests getting a working assistant into production safely: draft/live promotion, versioning, channel configuration, environment-specific settings and rollback.
Core rules
- Draft and live are separate. Build and preview in draft; publish a version to live. Live changes should go through the same test and approval path as code.
- Environment-specific values, such as API endpoints and credentials, belong to the environment, not to the action logic.
- Each channel has constraints: web chat supports rich elements; voice needs short prompts, no visual references and careful handling of barge-in; SMS needs brevity and plain text.
- Test the published version in the target channel, not only in preview. Preview may not reproduce channel rendering or latency.
- Keep a rollback version and know how to restore it. Record what changed in each publish.
- After release, watch analytics and error logs for the first real conversations.
Worked example
A team adds a new returns action. In draft they test happy path, invalid order, extension timeout and agent handoff. They publish version 12 to live, then embed web chat in a staging page. In the live channel, buttons render but the tracking link opens in the same frame, so they adjust the link target. When error rates rise, they restore version 11 while investigating. Reasoning: draft tests did not catch a channel rendering issue; versioning made rollback fast.
Traps
Editing live directly; using draft credentials in production; forgetting that voice cannot show a link; assuming a publish propagates instantly to every channel; and having no rollback plan. Another trap is testing only the new action and not the surrounding greeting, fallback and handoff.