Provisioning (Test-Account Self-Provisioning)
How MC Testing gets its own TEST-QA account: it signs itself up where signup allows, and stops for owner credentials — via a secret store only — where verification blocks it.
Definition
Authenticated testing needs an account, and using a real customer's account is never acceptable. Provisioning is the platform's disciplined way of obtaining a dedicated test account for a product. Where the product's signup is open — no email or phone verification, no CAPTCHA, no card required — the platform signs up itself, creating a self-provisioned identity of the form testqa+<product>-<random> on an email domain the owner controls, and verifies it can log in.
Where any of those gates appears, provisioning stops instead of pushing through: the account state becomes VERIFICATION_BLOCKED, CAPTCHA_BLOCKED or CARD_REQUIRED_BLOCKED, and the platform asks the owner for test credentials through a secret route. It never solves CAPTCHAs to create accounts, never enters a payment card, and never asks for credentials in chat, email or a report.
How MC Testing applies it
Credentials live only in the platform's server-side secret store. The database holds an opaque reference and a masked identifier (first character plus the domain), evidence and reports show only the mask, and test cases receive the values only as {{env.X}} placeholders at execution time. Every state change is recorded in a provisioning activity log, and everything the platform creates inside a product is entered in a creation register — TEST-QA-marked, listed for the owner's review, and cleaned up only on the owner's instruction, never automatically.
Provisioning is what unblocks a profile's authenticated journeys: until an ACTIVE test account exists, those cases stay visibly blocked and count against coverage rather than being skipped silently. See also Coverage.