An introductory guide to salesforce environments

Direct deployment of changes into production is one of the most typical mistakes made by Salesforce development teams. The result can be a broken feature, data corruption, or unplanned downtime.

Most organizations assume that Salesforce environment installation is a secondary concern until it breaks. Dan Appleman, Salesforce MVP and author of Advanced Apex Programming, notes: “Because execution contexts are shared, there are things that other developers can do that can impact the code that you write. And by impact, I mean break.”

However, there is a way, and the first step is to learn about the various Salesforce environments. With the proper structure, you can streamline development and testing and ensure that your production environment is stable.

This post will explore types of Salesforce environments, challenges in implementing them, and some best practices.

A Salesforce environment is a standalone, isolated copy of the Salesforce platform dedicated to different business activities, development, or operational cycles

Introduction to Salesforce environments

A Salesforce environment is a standalone, isolated copy of the Salesforce platform dedicated to different business activities, development, or operational cycles.

All Salesforce environments have their complete ecosystem composed of custom objects, fields, workflows, validation rules, page layouts, user profiles, permission sets, and applications.

The environment’s data storage space, metadata setups, and integration points are completely isolated. This isolation allows organizations to uphold data integrity and protection and have parallel development and testing practices.

Organizations use different environments to facilitate their software development life cycle.

Salesforce environments integrate systematic development, testing, and implementation processes to ensure an organization makes effective changes and maintains a quality-minded approach.

Types of Salesforce environments

Salesforce has different environments for developing, testing, and running business operations.

• Production Environment: The live, customer-facing org where the customer interacts with the actual business data. It holds the entire organization’s records, settings, and automations that run everyday operations, including sales, service, and marketing.
• Developer Sandbox: A disposable, isolated environment that you use to experiment with customizations and code that won’t affect production. It only has production’s metadata and can only do basic development work and unit testing, with limited storage (approximately 200MB of data storage) and a refresh frequency of once a day.
• Developer Pro Sandbox: Has a higher storage capacity than a standard Developer Sandbox. This makes it better suited for larger or more complex development work, including working with extensive data, creating more sophisticated integrations, or testing any custom logic that requires more resources.
• Partial Copy Sandbox: Encompasses metadata and a recognizable slice of production data determined by the user. Teams can choose what needs to be copied regarding objects and data samples using a sandbox template.
• Full Sandbox: The full copy of the production environment, including all the metadata and all the production data. It closely resembles a production environment, and testing verifies the system’s complete behavior under real-life conditions.
• Scratch Orgs: Non-persistent, source-oriented Apex environments introduced in Salesforce DX. They don’t conform to traditional sandboxes but are generated and described programmatically with the Salesforce CLI and described solely through configuration files. They have a limited life-span (up to 30 days) and are ideal for short-term development.

Best practices for Salesforce environment management

For effective Salesforce environment management, here are some best practices to follow:

• Develop an orderly hierarchical environment involving development, testing, staging, and production. Document all environments’ proposed use cases, access levels, and data requirements to avoid confusion and misuse.
• Establish various spots of quality confirmation and sanction, and make each checkpoint a door to the next tier of the deployment procedure.
• Update your sandbox environments by developing recurrent refresh cycles dependent on business requirements and environment types.
• Adhere to privacy policies such as GDPR and CCPA by using data masking in full or partial copy sandboxes, establish data-handling policies, and conduct frequent data access audits in all environments.
• Limit access to environments according to job and project needs. Introduce role-based access control, where developers can only access the environments required to deliver their tasks.
• Leverage Salesforce DevOps Center for version control mechanisms to control code releases, deployment scripts, and change sets, and incorporate strict rollback options in case of unsuccessful implementations.
• Perform periodic health checks to evaluate storage usage, performance requirements, and integration capabilities in all environments.

Sandboxes enable teams to test ideas and check modifications without the threat of affecting the live environment

Differences between production and sandbox environments

The production environment is the Salesforce environment that real users use. It has all the active data, configurations, and automation that underwrite the company’s core processes, including sales, customer service, and marketing.

Since it contains actual customer and transactional information, the risks of making changes in production are high. A single erroneous alteration may directly influence end users. Strict user access restrictions and auditing can be used to closely guard access to the production environment.

Conversely, a sandbox environment is a separate version of the production org, which you can use for development, testing, training, and staging. Sandboxes enable teams to test ideas and check modifications without the threat of affecting the live environment.

A sandbox can contain only metadata (Developer, Developer Pro), only a subset of production data (Partial Copy), or a complete copy of the production (Full Sandbox), based on type. Salesforce DX uses Scratch Orgs—single-purpose, temporary, and source-based entities well-suited to Agile-based and DevOps processes.

Using Salesforce environments effectively

Installing Salesforce environments correctly is the first step in establishing an effective development process and release cycle.

Setting up a Salesforce environment

According to the project requirement, choose the correct type of sandbox: Developer (for single-developer work), Developer Pro (more work-intensive), Partial Copy (focus on functional testing), or Full Copy (staging and regression work).

Next, you’ll set user configurations using the concept of least privilege. Establish clear naming conventions in the surroundings and document each sandbox’s purpose and time frame.

Developing in and using a Salesforce environment

Use Salesforce DX, VS Code, and the Salesforce CLI to manage code and metadata efficiently. For short-term feature development, use Scratch Orgs, and opt for Developer Sandboxes for long-term projects.

Record every change in a version control system, such as Git, and use feature branching approaches to prevent conflicts. Keeping both admins and developers in communication regularly will allow consistency between orgs and minimize repetition of configuration work.

Developing changes in Salesforce environments

It takes a lot more than writing code to develop changes in Salesforce. The first step is to scope the changes that teams should accomplish, as well as any business logic. Incorporate code reviews and testing before committing to common branches.

You can fix problems before they reach production by encouraging changes to progress in a structured, stepwise path, first through development, then QA, then staging, and then production.

Testing in Salesforce environments

Rigorously test any changes before deploying to production. Various forms of sandboxes accommodate varied degrees of testing. Partial Copy Sandboxes are the best to use during functional testing and UAT.

In contrast, Full Sandboxes mimic registration activities in a production environment so that you can do regression testing and performance testing. Using tools like Tricentis Test Automation for Salesforce, you can automate regression, functional, and end-to-end testing across multiple environments.

Common challenges in managing Salesforce environments

Here are some challenges you may face when managing Salesforce environments:

• Manual changes in one environment (such as QA or UAT) cannot reliably be carried over to other environments, causing deployment failures.
• There is a lack of precision in defining the purpose of individual sandboxes (e.g., which sandbox should be used for testing versus staging), or worse, multiple teams may work on the same tasks even though they might not be aware of it.
• Partial or Full Copy Sandboxes may be unavailable to smaller organizations or teams with limited licenses, limiting the possibility of testing realistically and developing in parallel.
• Numerous teams may test on outdated, irrelevant, or nonexistent data, which results in poor QA performance and undetected bugs.
• Manual deployment of changes commonly results in missing components, broken dependencies, and merge conflicts.
• Manual configurations, refreshes, and deployments are more likely to involve human error and are less repeatable.
• The refresh rate for the Full and Partial Copy Sandbox is long. Testing may be delayed when the teams take too much time to refresh or refresh at the wrong time.
• Without centralized tracking, it’s impossible to know who has changed what and why, which is troublesome, particularly when working with many teams or environments.

It’s all about treating each Salesforce environment as a well-coordinated system that reflects your team’s process maturity and quality-driven nature

Conclusion

Effective management of Salesforce environments is not merely a technical requirement. Every stage is essential to a properly managed Salesforce organization. However, unmanaged environments result in broken releases, confusion among developers, and expensive problems in production. It’s all about treating each Salesforce environment as a well-coordinated system that reflects your team’s process maturity and quality-driven nature.

This post was written by Mercy Kibet. Mercy is a full-stack developer with a knack for learning and writing about new and intriguing tech stacks.