You have the ability to test your mission from a scout's perspective before you start collecting data from research participants. This allows you to double check that there are no errors, as missions cannot be edited once they are launched.

In Test mode, you’re able to invite yourself and up to 4 other colleagues or friends to take your mission for a spin on the dscout app for up to 5 days. 

Feel free to start and stop test mode as often as you'd like! 

How to start Test mode

Click on "Test Mission" in the lower right hand corner of the Setup page.

You'll then be able to invite up to 5 testers.

Your test scouts will get an email invitation from the platform (they should check their spam or promotions inboxes if they don't see it!) They'll have 5 days to see exactly what your scouts will see and can even create entries in each activity of your mission. (After those 5 days, the test will automatically end). 

Note: testers will not have access to the project in the dscout platform unless they're added as project collaborators as well.

During testing, all mission activities are open and available to test out of order, whether you've set your mission activity availability to manual or automatic.

If you're happy with the mission design after trying it out, you can end the testing period manually in the Setup page by clicking on the "End Test" button in the lower right hand corner. 

Ending your test mission will delete all of the test data so that you can keep your mission data separate and clean. Your mission will be returned to draft mode, so you can launch it to scouts whenever you're ready!

Making changes to your mission

If, after testing your mission, you find opportunities to improve your mission design, you can still make changes. All you have to do is navigate to the Setup page and click "End Test" in the lower right hand corner, make all the edits you'd like and then launch your new-and-improved mission!