Environments

An environment is one combination of platforms — Chrome, Windows 11 — that a test run can be recorded against. It says exactly what a run was executed on.

Where to find it

Environments is a workspace setting. Open the account menu in the top right, choose My profile & settings, and pick Environments under the Workspace group in the settings rail — alongside Tags and Integrations. The page is titled Environments and carries the subtitle “Manage platform groups, platforms, and test environments.”

Everything lives on that one page: a Platform groups panel that lists every group with its platforms underneath it, and an Environments panel below it. Building environments opens a full page of its own.

How environments work

There are three things, and they stack:

1. Platform groups are the axes you test across — Browsers, Operating systems, Devices. The dialog that creates one describes a group as “One axis you test across — browsers, operating systems, devices.”
2. Platforms are the values on an axis — Chrome, Firefox and Safari inside Browsers.
3. Environments are combinations that take exactly one value from each group you picked from. Pick three browsers and three operating systems and you get nine environments, each one browser paired with one operating system.

One value per group, every time. You cannot build an environment that pairs Chrome with Firefox, and you cannot build one that skips an axis you picked from. If you select three browsers and three operating systems, every one of the nine results carries a browser and an operating system. To get browser-only environments, pick from the Browsers group alone.

An environment’s name is generated from its platforms — the platform names sorted alphabetically and joined with commas, so Chrome plus Windows 11 becomes “Chrome, Windows 11”. The name is fixed at creation and cannot be edited afterwards.

Each environment is then made available to projects — all of them, or a chosen set. Runs in those projects can be recorded against it.

Getting started

The first time you set this up, work top to bottom:

1. Open Settings → Environments.
2. Click New group and create an axis — Browsers, say.
3. Open that group’s … menu and choose Add platform… for each value on the axis. Repeat for every axis you need.
4. Click New environments and pick the platforms to combine. (Before any environment exists the Environments panel offers Build environments instead, which opens the same page.)

Who can manage environments

Access is decided by your access level, not by a custom role. Tenant Admins and Project Admins get the page and every action on it; anyone else gets the page heading and a single line, “You do not have permission to view environments.”

Viewing and managing are a single grant: there is no access level that can read the page without also being able to change it, and adding environment permissions to a custom role does not open the page.

No plan gate. The page behaves identically on every subscription plan — the panels, New group, New environments and every row menu are present on a Free workspace, with no upgrade prompt, and creating a platform there succeeds.