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# Environments and testing FAQ

> Guidance on safe testing, deployment pipelines, and managing multi-site agents.

Answers to questions about testing changes safely across environments (Draft, Sandbox, Pre-release, Live) and managing multi-location agents using variants.

#### How do I test changes safely before going live?

Use the [deployment pipeline](/agent-studio/deployments/overview) to test in isolated environments:

1. **Draft** – make changes in the editor.
2. **Sandbox** – publish your draft and test using [agent chat](/agent-studio/get-started/quickstart#test-your-agent) or a sandbox phone number.
3. **Pre-release** – promote for user acceptance testing (UAT).
4. **Live** – promote to live when ready.

You can [compare versions](/agent-studio/deployments/compare-versions) across environments before promoting, and [rollback](/agent-studio/deployments/overview#rolling-back-to-a-previous-version) if issues arise.

#### How do I manage multi-site or multi-location agents?

Use [variant management](/agent-studio/knowledge/variants/overview) to manage location-specific content in a single agent. Each variant stores attributes like phone numbers, addresses, and hours.

Variants are useful for:

* Hotel chains, restaurant groups, or retail chains with multiple branches
* Agents that need to respond differently based on which number was called
* Dynamically populating responses with location-specific data using `${variant_attribute}` syntax

See the [variant management guide](/agent-studio/knowledge/variants/overview) and [CSV imports](/agent-studio/knowledge/variants/csv-imports) for bulk configuration.