Salesforce Sandbox Management: Salesforce Sandboxes for Planning and Testing Changes

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: May 24th, 2024

Salesforce sandboxes give you a testing environment to experiment with the configuration and customization of your processes and projects. It’s essential to plan for testing systems in a Salesforce sandbox so that developers do not break or disrupt live production environments that are working and supporting business operations.

Join us in the article below to learn more about how to use a Salesforce sandbox before deploying new processes.

Difference Between Production and Sandbox in Salesforce

Understanding the difference between a production environment and a sandbox in Salesforce is essential to creating a plan that matches your unique testing requirements.

A production environment is your actual Salesforce instance. It is the platform where customer relationship management data is stored in real time. Your business processes, like customer interactions, will occur in the production environment. So, if you decide to make any changes to the production environment, you need to realize that it impacts all Salesforce users and business operations.

Any changes to a production environment could disrupt or break your processes. For this reason, it is important to test your updates before deploying them to your production environment.

You can quickly test your new features, processes, and fixes on a sandbox without disrupting your live processes. It’s a space that duplicates the production environment and lets developers create and edit Salesforce configurations or test out custom settings.

Efficient Change Rollouts from Sandboxes to Production

Trailblazers often use automation functionality to make the most reliable deployment changes from sandbox to production in Salesforce. One of the reasons why automated software rollouts are such a hit is that developers can work faster.

With manual releases, developers need to monitor the progress at every step. But with automated processes, development teams can deploy new features and fix bugs faster and more regularly. Automated rollouts to the product environment can also minimize risks for large projects and ensure the deployment size is not massive.

Testing Cycle with Salesforce

Salesforce Sandbox: Create & Refresh Guide

Adding a Sandbox environment can be accomplished in a few simple steps. It begins by copying Salesforce metadata from a production to a sandbox org. In Salesforce, you can create a sandbox by following the basic step-by-step guide below.

Go to Setup in Salesforce and search for sandboxes in the Quick Find box. Once you discover Sandboxes, select it and click on New Sandbox. Provide a name and description for the sandbox, then choose the sandbox you need.

Sandbox Template Salesforce

Now, you can pick the data you want to display in a Partial Copy or Full sandbox. If you have chosen a Partial Copy sandbox, simply click Next and select a Salesforce sandbox template. These templates are usually pre-designed. Check out the Salesforce website to learn how to create a new sandbox template.

On the other hand, if you need a Full copy Sandbox in Salesforce, click Next and select your data. Like the Partial Copy sandbox, you can work with a template.

Sandbox templates create consistency for your environments and ensure they are all set up exactly the same. The benefit of making one sandbox template for future use is that it eliminates errors from configuring all your environments.

Creating a Full Salesforce Sandbox

You get to copy all Salesforce data into a Full Sandbox. For this option, you must decide how much field tracking history data you want to work with. You will also need to figure out if you want to include feeds and message data from Chatter. These are important points to consider, as the more data you need to replicate to a sandbox, the longer it will take to create one.

Next, you should build scripts that will run after a sandbox is created or refreshed. For this task, you will need Apex coding knowledge.

Once you have completed creating your sandbox, you can grant access to User Groups or All Active Users. Then simply click Create to activate a sandbox in Salesforce and proceed with testing your systems reliably.

Salesforce Sandbox Login

There’s so much to gain from testing your processes, like picking up bugs or checking if your system works on a specific device. Follow our simple guide to quickly access a sandbox creation in Salesforce.

1. First, you need to wait for a notification email from Salesforce. It will inform you that your sandbox has been created and is ready to work in.

2. Click on the link in the email to be directed to your Salesforce sandbox.

3. Alternatively, you can access a sandbox by navigating to this URL: Login | Salesforce. If you use this route to log into a sandbox, add .sandbox_name to the Salesforce username. This means that you need to add the name of a sandbox, for example, “experiment,” to the end of a username, like so: [email protected].

Please note that if you are setting up usernames for a sandbox, they need to be unique. For this reason, when a Salesforce sandbox username exists, 7 digits are attached to the new username. So, your username would look like this: [email protected].

When you want to prevent people from accessing a Salesforce sandbox to keep your work secure, go to My Domain settings and configure the environment.

Best Practices for Salesforce Sandbox Testing

Now that you can access a Salesforce sandbox, you’re ready to tackle all the bugs in a project before adding changes to a production environment. There is a lot you already have to plan in delivering a project, so here are a few tips and tricks to help you manage new features and changes in a Salesforce sandbox.

Our first tip for managing information in a sandbox is to collect test data that will mirror your production environment. We suggest creating dummy data if you will be working with private information. Then, you also want to build test data that will cover every scenario you want to study so that you have covered all use cases before deploying new features into production.

Advice on Salesforce Sandbox Types

You should get to know the different types of Salesforce sandboxes. There are 4 types of sandboxes in Salesforce. You could use a Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy, or Full Copy sandbox. The sandbox you decide to use for testing a system will depend on the purpose of your project.

However, we understand that you could have many projects on the go at once. For this reason, a good strategy to employ is to have distinct sandboxes, with each one focusing on a different plan.

For example, you could have a sandbox for development and another for testing. You could certainly have more than two sandboxes. Consider one for staging and another for testing production.

Use Cases for Salesforce Sandbox Types

The Developer sandbox is popular for testing new features, customizing projects, and fixing bugs. You would want to create one to change your web project’s configurations and integrations independently from your central Salesforce platform. This is a valuable sandbox if you need to test projects before adding them to production.

We suggest using the Developer Pro sandbox if you have big teams made up of many software developers. This sandbox has more storage space for your projects than the Developer sandbox and yields higher software performance. The Developer Pro sandbox makes testing large projects created by numerous programmers super fast.

The Partial Copy sandbox is great for testing your project with large amounts of real-life Salesforce data. There are many instances when you need to safely test whether a project will survive in realistic conditions once released. A Partial Copy sandbox tests complicated processes and data transfers well, but it can also support testing the stability of software integrations.

And last up, we have the Full sandbox used for thoroughly testing and staging new software features and fixing bugs. A Full sandbox is an identical copy of a Salesforce production environment. That means it will mirror all your Salesforce data, config settings, and specific customizations to the platform. Organizations choose to set up a Full sandbox to stage a dependable environment that allows users to approve changes before deployment.

Working in these ways ensures that every stage of the software development lifecycle is well-organized and produces trusted results.

We hope to see you soon!

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