Many eCommerce companies enter code freezes on their primary production domains during the winter holidays, or at other intervals throughout the year. During a code freeze, no new code is deployed, which means issues on your eCommerce site should cease, right? Of course not. A code freeze is not the same as a work freeze–your business will no doubt continue operations through the freeze period–so we've compiled this guide on how Noibu can help with business operations, even when you aren't pushing updates to your primary domain.

Use Sessions for Customer Support

For most online stores, the winter holidays are the peak sales season, which may result in an influx of customer complaints or user issues. In this situation, Noibu's Sessions can double as a diagnostic tool for your customer support team. Use Noibu to find a user's session and determine if the problem is a user error or if there's a legitimate bug going on. Some of our partners give their support team direct access to Noibu for this purpose, while others set up processes for the support team to collect and relay session information to a developer or technical support rep.

The easiest way to find a specific session is to ask the shopper to generate a Help Code. This gives your developers a numerical code to quickly retrieve the problematic session. However, this method only works if a shopper reports an issue the same day they experience it. To find a specific session without the help code, you'll need to filter the list of sessions by details specific to the customer's experience. Check out our guide on Tracking Down a Session for more information.

Don't forget that Noibu has a software development kit (SDK) that lets you set custom attributes–like a customer ID or order ID–to more easily search through sessions.

Add a Staging Domain for Quality Assurance

While your company may have paused deploying code to your production domain, there could be updates going into a staging domain. Why not use the code freeze period to get a jump on QA? If you Add a Staging Domain to your Noibu account, you can discover and resolve bugs in the staging domain before they're deployed to the production domain. Adding a staging domain is quick work, and it's free!

Please note that, when hunting for issues in a staging domain, you're better off looking at the All Issues view over the Priority Issues view.

Audit Your Backlog of Issues

A code freeze is a great time to audit your issues and make sure everything is marked with the right state. This ensures your team will not continue investigating issues that have already been resolved, and that recurring, impactful issues aren't buried in the pile. An issue audit might involve tasks like:

• Reviewing Open and In-Progress issues that have had no occurrences in the past two to three weeks. If an issue has been resolved by your engineering team, or if an issue has gone away on its own, update the issue's state to Closed-Fixed.
• Checking that issues marked Closed-Fixed have not had recent recurrences. If an issue has returned, consider reopening it.
• Checking sessions that feature issues marked Closed-Ignore to ensure the issue is still affecting customers the same way. If an issue's impact has escalated, consider reopening it.

Monitor Issue Alerts

Pay attention to any email alerts received during the code freeze, and check the Priority View on the Issues page regularly. You may have taken a break from deploying code to production, but that doesn't mean issues and errors will take a break from causing strife. The last thing you want during the peak sales season is a checkout error that crushes your conversion.

Don't hesitate to reach out to our support team at support@noibu.com for tips to maximize efficiency in the Noibu platform.