Testing using sandboxes

Although a popular meme featuring Chuck Norris states that Testing is for wimps, real men test in production, believe me when I say this is not a good philosophy!

The ability to develop and test in dedicated and safe environments is key to the success of your efforts, whether it's a 1-year project or a 1-day highly intensive bugfix.

Sandboxes give us and our team the chance to work in an isolated place that mimics (more or less) production, where we can make all sorts of custom configurations and developments and test with production data or even train our users. Everything is done with the different kinds of sandboxes at our service.

Sandboxes can be created, deleted, cloned, and refreshed. Moreover, when a new Salesforce platform release is ready (this happens three times a year, with the winter, spring, and summer releases), sandboxes are the organizations where these major platform releases are first implemented by Salesforce before affecting production organizations, allowing us to test new features or make no regression tests. Depending on your organization instance (that is, the csXX in your sandbox's URL, for instance, https://cs88.salesforce.com/) and depending on specific limit dates before each release, you can decide to refresh a given sandbox to see the new release as soon as possible or only when production has been upgraded.

When a sandbox is created, it inherits all the metadata configurations from production (or the other sandbox from which it was cloned) and, depending on its type, some, all, or none of the data of the source organization.

Sandbox organizations can only be created from the Setup | Environments | Sandboxes page from production. Here is an example:

We can have different kinds of sandboxes, all of which we'll be describing shortly:

• Developer sandbox
• Developer Pro sandbox
• Partial Copy sandbox
• Full sandbox

We'll also have a look at how we can put an architecture of diverse sandboxes together so that we can handle changes from one testing organization to the other until production.