It’s no surprise that testing in a sandbox is a crucial part of the development process. Turns out, what you put in impacts what you get out –from the sandbox and beyond.
The reality is that if you’re testing with mediocre or fake data, you could be crossing your fingers more than you’d like to. Your code or configuration could work in testing but be a completely different story once it’s in production. Results built on a shaky foundation are far from what you set out to achieve, given the time, energy, and resources you’ve put into it.
So, how can you ensure that your sandbox is a safe space for trusted, effective production outcomes? It boils down to high-quality data. In this article, we unpack the importance of testing in a sandbox with high-quality data and why it’s worth the effort to source.
Create a realistic testing environment
Your data is filled with unique relationships. After all, it’s what makes your data your data. And, these relationship intricacies should be honored in every environment, especially your sandbox. Unfortunately, with the common practice of testing on fake or old data, these important data relationships can be misconfigured, mismatched, or omitted altogether.
While it may be tempting to check the testing boxes with “good enough” data, it can prove to do more harm than good. Low-quality data puts your testing environment at risk of becoming a far cry from reality. Without important relationships intact, you may generate safe testing results but risk leaving out edge cases, which are far too common in production. This can stunt your innovation and generate more work when it comes to retesting.
With Own Accelerate, our sandbox seeding solution for Salesforce, you can ensure that your data relationships–and peace of mind–remain intact. Accelerate pulls data directly from production, allowing users to easily seed data to any sandbox with desired objects and records, maintaining all data relationships. This way, you can trust that your testing works as intended with actual data relationships and will stand up in production – in just a few clicks.
Avoid future work delays
Whether you’re designing and writing code, unit testing, or basic functionality testing, there’s a lot of work that goes into bringing something to production–which means that the moment you get there, you want to hit the ground running. But your sprint can quickly turn to a crawl if you didn’t work with the right data in your sandbox.
Cutting corners with “good enough data” could end up cutting into your productivity time in times that matter most. If bugs or errors make their way into production, you have to double back and correct your mistakes, delaying important timelines and milestones.
Imagine you're building new triggers and configurations for a groundbreaking new product. The sales team is buzzing to get started, and it’s up to you to conduct testing so the new records are created correctly and automatically linked to the right accounts and opportunities. For efficiency's sake, you create a generic case using fake data to speed up testing. Turns out, your attempt to save time actually added more of it. Since your fake data was much cleaner than what was in production, you left out some edge cases, creating a gap between the idealized sandbox environment and the actual production environment. This incongruence forced you to go back and conduct additional testing, delaying your team, timelines, and the company’s sales objectives.
Accelerate helps move innovation forward, minimizing corrective steps in the process. With its quick seeding abilities, you can seed quality data into any sandbox or sub-prod environment for development or testing purposes and get to work faster. By testing with up-to-date, high quality seed data, you’ll be releasing configurations to Salesforce with fewer bugs and errors, delivering value more quickly.
Be an empowered member of your team
Your team is working hard, and counting on you and your colleagues to deliver on releases. Given the dependencies that are built on good testing, you must be mindful of your decisions every step of the way. And, you want to know that you can work with the best data for the job, versus using fake data to protect sensitive data in production.
If you overlook the importance of seeding high quality data, your results can impact more than just you–they can be absorbed by your team and users. Between important project delays and additional workloads, your testing choices could disrupt your team’s productivity, flow, and confidence–not to mention the direct impact on your future work duties and responsibilities. After all, you want to be known for your hard work, not the hard work it took to clean up your errors.
With Accelerate, you can feel confident, knowing that your testing is rooted in high quality and integrity. You won’t have to cross your fingers before production, hoping your work doesn’t get flagged by users. Accelerate also enables you to easily anonymize fields with anonymization templates that mask data before it’s seeded to the sandbox. This way, you can work with data that is protected, producing outcomes that move your team and your organization forward.
Ace the test with Accelerate
Your sandbox is the epicenter of innovation. And, in order to get the most out of it, you need to put the most into it, starting with high quality data. Own Accelerate enables you to get to work faster, with safe and easy data seeding to your sandbox. By testing with high quality data, you can source outcomes that you can trust, in both production and your team. Don’t (sand)box yourself in. Request a demo today.
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