Quite often multiple developers work on the same developer org and the other team members must work on their development environment. After the development, separate environments are required for testing and training purposes. So, before implementation, every stage of SDLC requires a separate environment. Sandboxes help to increase the efficiency of your project teams. You can use different types of sandboxes or different copies of the same sandbox type for serving your area of interest. Sandboxes can be created with production instances and the user gets a notification when the sandbox creation is completed.
Sandboxes are special types of boxes in Salesforce which are copies of the production organization for the developers, used to serve multiple purposes of development, Quality Assurance(QA), staging, UAT and training. However, sandboxes are fully isolated from the production org. The developer can deploy change sets from one sandbox to another within the production org.
Sandboxes help the developers to incorporate change requests or changes in code and then migrate to the production environment. The source of truth for sandboxes is the production organization. Salesforce offers provisions for creating partial and full copy templates but not for developer and developer pro type of sandboxes. Sandboxes can be refreshed and cloned from other sandboxes as well.
The sandboxes contain the metadata related to configurations, customizations, apps and code, used in the production environment. There may be some instances of sandboxes that are related to the production environment.
A sandbox template is created with the following steps:
Step 1: Go to Setup->Quick Search Menu->Sandbox
Step 2: Click New Sandbox.
Step 3: Enter the Sandbox name and the description.
Step 4: Select the type from the list.
Step 5: Click Start Copy
On completion of the copying the user receives a notification email. There is a link inside the mail, clicking which the user can access the sandbox. After adding objects to the sandbox template the user needs to Click on Save to save the sandbox.
https://test.Salesforce.com
Or
There are different types of sandboxes. What are these? Let us find out more.
This is the most basic type of sandbox which is available with the majority of Salesforce licenses. Here the testing environment gets created with a metadata copy from the production environment.
A developer Pro Sandboxes have higher storage limits and differs slightly from the standard developer environment. They are available only in Performance and unlimited Salesforce Versions. They provide 1 GB of data and file storage.
This allows the developer not only to copy the metadata but a part of your data. This is beneficial for the developers when they need to test new functionality based on live data or alternately train the users with live data for testing purposes.
Here all metadata and data related to production get copied. This replicates the production org for complete testing of functionality and using it for training. The refresh interval here is 29 days and the storage limit is similar to the production org.
The best practices are:
After the development, separate environments are required for testing and training purposes. So, before your team reaches an implementation stage, it is important for every SDLC stage to have a separate environment. Sandboxes help to streamline processes and improve the productivity of the processes when the sandbox strategies and the refresh intervals align with the sprint calendar when your team works with Agile methodologies.
Moreover, a Salesforce full sandbox refresh takes time and there is no single checklist for all sandboxes. Sandboxes are also beneficial for version control, code management, app development, training and above all for testing purposes. They cater to the user’s needs and also provide technical documentations. And, finally, sandboxes do not compromise on the data in the Salesforce organization.
Blog