Sandbox seeding
April 25, 2024
Salesforce sandbox seeding basics
A comprehensive guide to data seeding in Salesforce
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Sandbox seeding, or data seeding, is the practice of populating a Salesforce org with record data after it’s created or refreshed. While sandbox seeding is a commonly used term, it’s important to note that data seeding also applies to other types of Salesforce orgs, including scratch orgs and even production.
Sandbox seeding is valuable at various stages of the DevOps process. It enables admins and developers to:
A sandbox is simply a Salesforce environment that you can use for making and testing changes: then training users on those updates before making them available in production.
When starting a new sprint, you ideally start work in your own environment—perhaps a Developer or Developer Pro org. By giving everyone their own sandbox, you get quicker outcomes while virtually eliminating the chance of accidentally deploying unfinished work into production or—yikes—overwriting someone else’s work. It also minimizes the risk of exposing sensitive data or impacting the daily tasks of your end users.
Most Salesforce updates impact record data in one way or another, so it’s helpful to have real business data in your dev environment. Of course, it’s technically true that you can use “dummy data.” But there’s nothing like substantial, real data to ensure quality. It’s easier to spot errors and issues when you’re working with real data. Moreover, you can compare against production to see exactly how the changes you’re working on would impact production data and user workflows.
Once you’re confident your new solution is working the way you want it to, the next step is to make sure it plays nice with the changes other teammates have been making and, of course, production. To do this, everybody has to promote their changes to a shared sandbox for testing.
It’s advisable to seed data into the testing environment to achieve a production-like environment with current, clean data so you can be confident your changes will work in production.
The majority of Salesforce changes should follow a release path where work starts in an individual Dev org and gets promoted up to testing sandboxes and ultimately pushed into production.
However, there’s also a solid argument to have an exception process for quick changes or hotfixes. Due to the urgent nature of hotfixes, it’s wise to make changes in a dedicated sandbox and push them into production. This allows you to keep production running smoothly.
On the downside, it can cause the orgs in the standard release path to become out of sync with production. That’s why it is important after a hotfix to seed the testing and training sandboxes. That way, you can be sure all regular development projects have the latest configurations and data.
Finally, one of the other benefits of seeding sandboxes with actual production data is that you can now create a training environment for new end users and even new hires. How can you expect a new user to learn and understand how to use Salesforce if they don’t have real-life scenarios and data for practice? Dummy data can inhibit the learning process because it doesn’t provide the necessary business context for users. That’s why keeping your training org current makes the transition to production easier for new users.
Seeding sandboxes should be a best practice for any development or QA team. However, several challenges can impact efficiency and costs:
Prodly’s sandbox seeding wizard solves all these challenges efficiently and effectively.
Interested in learning how to boost the quality of your test data? Request a demo to see Prodly in action!
You should always make updates and changes to Salesforce in a sandbox because that’s an isolated environment. If the change doesn’t work the way you want it to, it won’t affect any real-life processes in your CRM and hinder business operations. By making changes in a development environment, you can ensure they work the way you want them to before promoting them to your production environment.
Yes, it can help because it allows you to create a training environment that mirrors production, i.e. your real-life CRM. That means you can train new users in a highly realistic environment where even if something goes wrong, it won’t impact business operations.
Sandbox seeding, or data seeding, is the practice of populating a Salesforce org with record data after it’s created or refreshed. While sandbox seeding is a commonly used term, it’s important to note that data seeding also applies to other types of Salesforce orgs, including scratch orgs and even production.
Sandbox seeding is valuable at various stages of the DevOps process. It enables admins and developers to:
A sandbox is simply a Salesforce environment that you can use for making and testing changes: then training users on those updates before making them available in production.
When starting a new sprint, you ideally start work in your own environment—perhaps a Developer or Developer Pro org. By giving everyone their own sandbox, you get quicker outcomes while virtually eliminating the chance of accidentally deploying unfinished work into production or—yikes—overwriting someone else’s work. It also minimizes the risk of exposing sensitive data or impacting the daily tasks of your end users.
Most Salesforce updates impact record data in one way or another, so it’s helpful to have real business data in your dev environment. Of course, it’s technically true that you can use “dummy data.” But there’s nothing like substantial, real data to ensure quality. It’s easier to spot errors and issues when you’re working with real data. Moreover, you can compare against production to see exactly how the changes you’re working on would impact production data and user workflows.
Once you’re confident your new solution is working the way you want it to, the next step is to make sure it plays nice with the changes other teammates have been making and, of course, production. To do this, everybody has to promote their changes to a shared sandbox for testing.
It’s advisable to seed data into the testing environment to achieve a production-like environment with current, clean data so you can be confident your changes will work in production.
The majority of Salesforce changes should follow a release path where work starts in an individual Dev org and gets promoted up to testing sandboxes and ultimately pushed into production.
However, there’s also a solid argument to have an exception process for quick changes or hotfixes. Due to the urgent nature of hotfixes, it’s wise to make changes in a dedicated sandbox and push them into production. This allows you to keep production running smoothly.
On the downside, it can cause the orgs in the standard release path to become out of sync with production. That’s why it is important after a hotfix to seed the testing and training sandboxes. That way, you can be sure all regular development projects have the latest configurations and data.
Finally, one of the other benefits of seeding sandboxes with actual production data is that you can now create a training environment for new end users and even new hires. How can you expect a new user to learn and understand how to use Salesforce if they don’t have real-life scenarios and data for practice? Dummy data can inhibit the learning process because it doesn’t provide the necessary business context for users. That’s why keeping your training org current makes the transition to production easier for new users.
Seeding sandboxes should be a best practice for any development or QA team. However, several challenges can impact efficiency and costs:
Prodly’s sandbox seeding wizard solves all these challenges efficiently and effectively.
Interested in learning how to boost the quality of your test data? Request a demo to see Prodly in action!
You should always make updates and changes to Salesforce in a sandbox because that’s an isolated environment. If the change doesn’t work the way you want it to, it won’t affect any real-life processes in your CRM and hinder business operations. By making changes in a development environment, you can ensure they work the way you want them to before promoting them to your production environment.
Yes, it can help because it allows you to create a training environment that mirrors production, i.e. your real-life CRM. That means you can train new users in a highly realistic environment where even if something goes wrong, it won’t impact business operations.
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