Facebook Dummy Accounts For User Interaction Testing Being Banned

Question

I am software tester working on outsourced projects for many clients.

Frequently, I am required to test Facebook apps just before they go live. Often, the content of the app requires several interactions with other Facebook friends, including pulling of tagged photos and retrieving a user's info.

Most advice suggests that I should be using Facebook test accounts, created by a developer of a specific app. However, due to the complexity of some of the requirements in order to fully test certain apps, a dummy account - pre-filled with 'real' information is much more practical to use. It is clear that if we were to add all of this detail to Facebook test accounts for every new project, we would never get any time to actually test the app.

My company has approximately 20-30 dummy user accounts on Facebook, all of which have a good level of detail including personal info, photos, friend networks etc. These are perfect for testing as they are normal Facebook accounts. We always set option to private to prevent any sensitive material from being seen by the general public.

Over the last moth or more, our dummy user accounts are being systematically wiped out where Facebook is blocking them. Clearly, we cannot re-instate these accounts as we have no ID for the 'dummy' users.

Our aim is to aid the developers to improve the quality of their Facebook apps, and so has no detrimental effect on Facebook as a company or a brand.

Is there any way to achieve our requirements without the constant battle to maintain our dummy accounts?

Answer 1

Login to facebook. Then use /whitehat in the URL. On the left hand side you will get an option to create test accounts.

Answer 2

Test users are the only way to do this without violating Facebook's terms of service.

You can use multiple apps with a Test User, assuming you're not deleting and recreating them between test runs