Get Started with Seeding

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain common challenges in development and testing in sandbox environments.
  
• Identify how Seeding addresses common challenges in Salesforce sandboxes.
  
• Explain the core capabilities of Seeding.
  
• Describe the core benefits of using Seeding for Salesforce administrators and other roles.
  

The Data Dilemma: Why Manual Data Entry Just Doesn't Work

As a Salesforce administrator or developer, you are often building new features, and enhancing existing functionalities within Salesforce. To ensure these new developments work as designed, your teams must test them rigorously. This is where the challenge begins.

Manually creating test data is a significant time sink. It's a tedious and error-prone process that pulls valuable developer and QA attention away from more innovative tasks. Every new feature requires specific data scenarios, and recreating these by hand for each test cycle quickly becomes a bottleneck. Furthermore, copying or moving data from a highly relational platform like Salesforce is complex. For example, if you copy a single account record for testing, you also need to replicate its related contacts, opportunities, cases, and custom objects linked to the account. Manually preserving these complex data relationships is a huge headache.

While sandbox refreshes are a great solution for Partial Copy and Full sandboxes, it’s not always feasible to refresh as frequently as required. Additionally, Developer, Developer Pro, and Scratch orgs do not have a way to simply populate data for development. Building or testing new features against stale data leads to inaccurate results and causes bugs to slip into production unnoticed.

Finally, customer demos and new user training need current, relevant, and realistic data. Lacking this can make presentations and training programs unsuccessful and uninspiring. Overall, these challenges ultimately slow down development cycles, compromise testing quality, and introduce unnecessary risk, impacting your organization's ability to deliver value to your customers.

Seeding: Your Solution to Salesforce Data Challenges

Seeding tackles these pervasive sandbox data management challenges by populating datasets from a Salesforce production org or sandbox into various Salesforce sandbox types (Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy, and Full), and even into scratch orgs.

Seeding helps you overcome the limitations of manual data entry and stale sandboxes. Build templates that define a subset of related data from a source org and then use these templates to quickly and repeatedly seed any sandbox with an identical metadata structure. This means that you can rapidly provision sandboxes with the exact data needed for specific testing or training scenarios, saving countless hours and improving data quality.

Seeding offers a robust set of features to streamline your data management.

Template and Data Structure

Seeding provides you with tools and methods to define the structure and relationships of the data you want to seed. Use these features to build, manage, and share templates and to ensure consistency and precision in your datasets.

• Template Management: Build and manage templates to define datasets and visualize object relationships, and then share these templates across your organization. This ensures consistency and reusability of data configurations across test environments.
  
• Maintain Object Relationships: Seeding preserves complex Salesforce data relationships. Levels templates automatically include related records based on hierarchy (for example, including all related objects for the accounts object), while Nodes templates enable administrators to explicitly select specific related objects to include.
  
• Template Types: Seeding offers these template types:
  
  • Nodes Template: Add every object you want to seed. You start with a single object, known as the root object, then include child objects and any optional parent objects. You can continue to add as many root objects as required. This method requires a detailed understanding of your source's data hierarchy.
    
  • Levels Template: Select the first objects that you want to seed, typically at the top of your data hierarchy. These are your root objects. For each root object, you simply specify the number of data hierarchy levels down to include additional related objects.
    
  • Generate Template: Add all the objects (root, children, and optional parents) for which you want to first generate synthetic data and then seed that data into a sandbox.
    

Data Control and Integrity

These features give you granular control over the data being seeded, ensuring its quality, relevance, and integrity. These tools help you filter, sample, and manage the data to create a perfect test environment.

• Flexible Filtering: Use simple and powerful filters to select precisely the records or record types you want to include in your seeded data. This granular control ensures your sandboxes contain only the relevant data.
  
• Coverage Feature: Use the Sample for Coverage feature to ensure your sandbox has a representative dataset that reflects the full spread of the values in your production org.
  
• Flexible Data Sources: Seed data from a live production org to get the latest real-time data, or seed data from a backup. The ability to seed from a backup service requires Backup & Recover.
  
• Generate and Seed Synthetic Data: Generate synthetic data and seed it directly into a sandbox without the requirement of selecting a seeding source. The Generate template enables you to create relevant test data for objects without having to copy the data from a production org or from another sandbox. When developers and testers use Seeding and Anonymize together, they save time by not having to manually create test data or find a suitable source from which to copy it.
  

Operational and Advanced Features

These features streamline the seeding process itself, addressing operational efficiency, automation, and troubleshooting. They are designed to improve the overall workflow and reliability of your data management tasks.

• Incremental Seeding: Fine-tune your datasets using incremental seeds, allowing for efficient updates without a full data refresh every time.
  
• Troubleshooting and Reporting: Quickly troubleshoot permissions or data issues using the Seeding Summary report, which provides insights into the seeding process.
  
• Automation Management: Seeding provides options to disable Salesforce trigger automations during the seeding process. This feature is like a traffic cop that prevents unintended side effects or errors caused by these automations firing on newly inserted data.
  

The Business Value of Seeding

For Salesforce administrators and developers, Seeding offers significant benefits and business value.

• Reduced Operational Costs: Automated data provisioning and reduced manual data entry lowers the operational costs associated with Salesforce development and testing, generating about $127K in productivity-based ROI.
  
• Accelerated Time-to-Market: Readily available and realistic data create efficient development and testing cycles, which lead to a faster time-to-market for new features. Application teams using Seeding boosted productivity by 12%, delivering value to customers more quickly.
  
• Empowered Administrators: Quickly provision sandboxes with relevant data for various teams—developers, QA, sales, and training—without the need for manual data entry or complex data loader operations.
  
• Enhanced Testing Quality: QA and UAT testers can perform more thorough and accurate testing using production-like data, enabling them to identify bugs earlier in the development lifecycle and ensure higher-quality releases.
  
• Streamlined Demos and Training: Seeding makes it easy to provide compelling customer demos with tailored data, and also offers new employees realistic sandboxes for hands-on learning that simulates real-world scenarios.
  

By automating the seeding process for your Salesforce sandboxes and scratch orgs, you give your teams the right data at the right time, leading to faster innovation and a more robust Salesforce org.

Resources

• Own Knowledge Base: Getting Started with Seeding for Salesforce