Hi Community,
I'm looking for guidance on best practices for managing survey changes between Qualtrics sandbox and production environments.
In our case, the sandbox and production environments are separate Qualtrics accounts. We would like to develop and validate changes in sandbox and then promote them to production before going live.
Typical changes include:
- Survey questions
- Survey Flow
- Branching and display logic
- Embedded Data
- Custom JavaScript/CSS
- New survey versions
After discussing this with Qualtrics Support, my understanding is:
- There is currently no built-in sync capability between sandbox and production instances/accounts.
- Exporting and importing a QSF transfers the survey structure only, not response data.
- Importing a survey creates a new survey with a new Survey ID.
- There is no supported way to automatically synchronize workflows, configurations, or survey changes between sandbox and production while retaining the existing Survey ID.
- Applying changes via QSF import would require creating a new survey rather than updating an existing production survey.
This seems challenging from a deployment and governance perspective, especially for teams that want to test thoroughly before release.
I'm interested in learning how others handle this:
- How do you promote tested survey changes from sandbox to production?
- Do you manually recreate changes in production?
- Are there any API-driven, CI/CD, or version-control approaches that have worked well?
- How do you manage regression testing and change governance?
- If preserving the existing production Survey ID and response history is required, what deployment strategy do you recommend?
I'd appreciate hearing how enterprise Qualtrics teams and administrators manage this process in practice.
Thanks in advance for any insights or recommendations.
