Salesforce administrators and developers know firsthand how bugs and bad code can adversely affect new code released in to production. Keeping your production environment free of bad code is essential to innovation, and Salesforce sandboxes can help you achieve that goal throughout the development process.
As separate environments dedicated to development, testing and training, sandboxes provide strategic benefits to your software development lifecycle (SDLC). Just as valuable, Sandbox seeding can help reduce operational risk and downtime in production and allow you to catch issues early.
Learn more about the types of Salesforce sandboxes and how seeding can save valuable time and effort in the long run.
Admins and developers use sandboxes to make changes and test those changes before they go live. This prevents them from having to make those changes directly in production, which could potentially cause data loss, delays and other issues along the way.
Salesforce provides multiple sandboxes that are designed for specific purposes, such as:
- Developer: Developer sandboxes are designed for coding and testing tasks that typically require small subsets of data.
- Developer Pro: Developer Pro sandboxes have the added benefit of increased data storage. They provide room for additional tasks, such as integration testing, quality assurance (QA) testing and training.
- Partial Copy: Partial Copy sandboxes are designed for QA tasks. These tasks may include user acceptance testing (UAT), integration testing and training.
- Full Copy: Full Copy sandboxes are designed to act as a testing environment. These are the only types of sandboxes that support performance testing, load testing and staging.
While each individual sandbox suits different tasks, all of them help reduce the chances of compromising crucial production data and metadata.
Here are the top six advantages of Salesforce sandbox seeding:
1. Safely create, build and test new features: When it's time to make changes to your production org, your sandboxes let you do so in an isolated environment. Each sandbox mirrors the production environment for authentic results, and you're free to test and retest as many times as you need until you achieve your goals.
2. Reduce development errors: How often have you had to spend time resolving bugs in production? Sandbox seeding allows you to complete projects more efficiently and pinpoint issues earlier in the process when they're easier and cheaper to fix.
3. Schedule updates for your company: When it's time to update your software, sandboxes make it easy to plan ahead. Admins and development teams can build, test and fine-tune updates to ensure everything works according to the update's specifications and it's available by the projected release date.
4. Protect your production org: Sandboxes create a safe space for training new users. They can practice without putting your data at risk by entering incorrect data or accidentally deleting a critical file. This environment gives admins peace of mind when onboarding new users and helps ensure new users can confidently learn without fear of mistakes.
5. Increase productivity: With the freedom to innovate and test in an isolated environment, admins and developers can get right to work. There are no production constraints to hold up the process, and the environment is true to life to ensure the results integrate into your production org smoothly.
6. Improve user experiences: Enjoy fewer interruptions and delays. Sandbox seeding Salesforce data helps ensure each team in your company is continuously working in stable, productive environments.
While the benefits of sandbox seeding are clear, this process isn't without its own set of challenges. This is where intuitive sandbox seeding tools prove highly useful. These tools can help make innovation simpler and safeguard sensitive data in the process.
OwnBackup's Enhanced Sandbox Seeding solution lets you seamlessly define, fine-tune and automate specific data sets to effectively replicate any environment. With Enhanced Sandbox Seeding, you can also apply custom templates to anonymize sensitive information before it is seeded to its destination. Our seeding solution helps you innovate faster, minimize errors and reduce costly rework. Request a personalized demo to view our services in action or connect with us to learn more.
