What To Consider Before Seeding Your Salesforce Sandboxes

The growing adoption and availability of low-code and no-code development platforms can tempt even the most seasoned developer to push code live as soon as possible to satisfy business demands.

Despite that pressure, there is an equal and opposite charter for developers to not release code without first testing it. That’s because when bad code is released from coding and testing into production, it takes three times as long and costs up to 15 times as much to fix bugs.

To balance these competing priorities, developers rely on sandbox environments for testing development work. However, getting that data into a sandbox (a process commonly referred to as sandbox seeding) can be difficult and time consuming.

So what should development teams consider when looking for a sandbox seeding solution? Here are several key questions to ask before beginning to seed your sandbox environments.

Is your seeding solution precise?

Are you in control of exactly where your data goes and comes from? An effective sandbox seeding tool will give you the option to add all records, delete existing records and replace with new, or only update incremental changes since the previous seed.

Is your seeding solution reusable?

‍Having to start from scratch each time you need to seed can make populating sandboxes extremely time consuming. Does your tool make you start with all of your data and trim it down to what you need, or can you start with only the specific data you need and add more later?

Is your seeding solution flexible?

‍Data is most valuable when it’s fresh. But oftentimes, you seed your sandbox only to identify new requirements shortly afterward. Does your seeding solution allow you to easily add or remove data based on new requirements?

Is your seeding solution compliant?

‍Privacy has never been as important to business as it is today. The wealth of knowledge and insights companies can amass from customers makes it critical that developers have ways of protecting that data when sharing amongst team members or outside consultants/developers.

How does your sandbox seeding solution stack up?

If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, it might be time to rethink your sandbox seeding strategy.

Own Accelerate is an intuitive and powerful sandbox seeding solution for organizations that want to maximize their Salesforce platform for training, development, or testing. Salesforce administrators and developers can easily seed quality data to any sandbox with desired objects and records while maintaining all relationships and masking all sensitive information.

To learn more, check out "The Ultimate Guide to Sandbox Seeding in Salesforce", or request a demo below.