Speed is crucial in most aspects of business, but particularly software development. To innovate and stay ahead, you need to deliver new features quickly. Salesforce supports these goals by providing developers with a customizable environment to quickly build, test, and deploy applications directly within its platform. However, balancing fast development and avoiding mistakes isn’t always easy. Here are four tips to ensure fewer errors in your Salesforce development process.
Ensure Accurate Lower Development Environments
A critical aspect of minimizing errors in development is ensuring that test environments in Salesforce, known as sandboxes, accurately mimic real-world conditions. Without production-like lower environments, you will hope rather than know that your code will work in production. This alignment between environments reduces the risk of unforeseen issues and helps maintain the integrity of deployments, ensuring smoother transitions and fewer surprises down the road.
Simplify Sandbox Management
Manual workflows for data propagation and sandbox management can waste days per sprint and result in sandboxes filled with stale, outdated production data. Streamlining this process saves valuable time and ensures more accurate data. Automated sandbox management, such as scheduled seeding jobs and disabling automations, reduces errors and allows developers to focus on innovation rather than administrative tasks. This leads to higher productivity and better outcomes.
Protect Production Data with Every Deployment
Safeguarding your environment before each deployment is crucial. This ensures that any issues in the production environment can be easily identified and corrected. By backing up data and metadata before deployment, you can quickly restore systems to their previous state if something goes wrong, minimizing downtime and protecting business operations from disruptive errors.
Verify Deployments and Correct Issues
Constantly monitoring and verifying deployments lets you spot problems right away. When developers update their code and settings in production, they need to quickly see if the changes affected their Salesforce environment negatively or if the metadata changes were correct. If there's a problem, being able to revert to the correct metadata is crucial. This proactive approach reduces the impact of errors and keeps the production environment stable and performing well.
How Own Can Help
Our sandbox seeding and backup and recovery solutions support your on-platform development efforts by providing accurate test data, more frequently refreshed sandboxes, and faster production cycles. This way, developers can confidently meet deadlines, and if errors occur, we offer near-instant notification, analysis, and rollback of bad metadata code and data corruption or loss.
Want to learn more? Download our guide, “Building Better, Faster in Salesforce: Strategies for More Efficient Development”.
