VP of Marketing
Hayley Coxon is the Vice President of Marketing and Revenue Operations for Prodly and accidental admin since 2010. You can find her on LinkedIn.
In this blog, we explore what bidirectional sandbox seeding is and why you need it. We also look at the value of sandbox seeding with Prodly Sandbox Management, as well as why you should be seeding sandboxes in the first place.
Bidirectional sandbox seeding involves deploying data from your production org to a sandbox—and from your sandbox to another environment. You can do this with a freshly created org or during an environment refresh.
Bidirectional sandbox seeding allows you to create a fresh sandbox, deploy data to it, and then move data in any direction—up, down, and laterally. You can roll back changes to start all the way at the beginning, or you can change just one tiny detail.
This makes for a much better auditability of changes in production and deployment results, resulting in better governance.
When you’re only able to work with partial data, the chance of bugs and errors slowing down your progress is immense. Many teams lose steam in the development and QA process when they go the route of manually working with a sandbox test data set.
In contrast, bidirectional sandbox seeding gives control to anyone who can click through a data management workflow.
With the sandbox seeding feature in Prodly Sandbox Management, you have the ability to move data in both directions—with just a few clicks. This allows you to maximize your team’s efficiency, transform your entire workflow, and improve your end-user experience.
By using this low-code option for DevOps, you’ll soon be handling change requests like clockwork.
The seamless, automated process for seeding sandboxes Prodly provides enhances your governance strategy.
It increases org health, fights errors, and improves efficiency tremendously. Here’s how:
Prodly Sandbox Management can help you move your data up, down, backward and forward between your production org and sandboxes.
It gives you the power to migrate data from up to five orgs simultaneously. This eliminates the need to depend on a Full Copy sandbox to work from as you advance through changes.
You can also configure data simulations, meaning that you can make changes without consequences. When you need to deploy complex data from a schema all at once, you don’t have to worry about complications anymore.
Without the sandbox seeding feature in Prodly Sandbox Management, you’re literally left to your own devices having to use a barrage of tools to handle what Prodly does seamlessly.
There’s the tedious process of using a data loader. The difficulty, duration, and mind-numbingness of the project can be compounded based on the size of your project.
Some companies employ a third-party developer to manage their sandbox, which can become quite costly.
In contrast, with Prodly, you can populate—and even anonymize— representative test data into as many as five orgs in just a matter of minutes. Prodly gives you more control of your data and processes, as well as a greater probability of aligning your team with the needs of your stakeholders for every project.
There are several very good reasons to seed sandboxes.
Without sandbox seeding, there’s a lack of representative production data in lower-level sandboxes that makes it harder to imagine, configure, and test changes.
This problem becomes more complicated as changes move up the release pipeline and you need to keep all of the sandboxes in sync with production.
However, sandbox seeding lets you provide everyone with their own development environment before they promote their changes to a shared QA org and ultimately production. This circumvents the problem of who’s doing what in a shared sandbox—plus, it reduces the odds of overwriting each other’s work.
It lets your team work faster and test more thoroughly. It also gives you more effective use of your expensive sandboxes.
In addition, when everyone has their own development environment with representative data, it’s much easier to find a good window of time to refresh your Full Copy or Partial Copy sandbox. And that in turn reduces the number of errors you encounter during the development process.
Discover how easy and quick it is to seed sandboxes with Prodly Sandbox Management—watch the 25-minute webinar Ask a CSM: Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding.
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