I’m working on clearing up our build processes of a PhoneGap app we’re developing for iOS and Android, and I want to develop a concise naming scheme for our different build types.

Here’s what I’m currently thinking of:

• Testing with Sandbox API – sandbox
• Testing with Production API – prodbox
• Release with Production API – release

Now sandbox and release are standard terms, but I imagine prodbox is fairly unique to our team.

To flesh out what this is and what this isn’t – it’s a build which uses our production API, but will include non-release features, such as:

• Testing-specific error logging
• No usage analytics
• (potentially) More verbose in-app error messaging
• Debuggable for Android

It’s for use in-house only, usually during the latter half of our sprint cycle when development is almost done and the QA process is underway.

Now we quite like the term prodbox, but is there a more standard term we can use instead?

Staging?

I was thinking about “staging” being a possibility, but my understanding is that staging is an imitation of the production environment. It doesn’t give you assurance that you’re working with production data, so that would be no aide to what I’m trying to achieve.

Pre-prod?

Just heard of the term “pre-prod”, which seems to be similar to staging, in that it’s a mirror of the production environment, rather than using at least part of the actual production environment.