Develop and Test Features Using Salesforce Sandboxes

Learning Objectives

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

Define a sandbox.
List the benefits of using sandboxes.
Identify which sandbox type fits your development and testing use case.

Testing a New Idea

Zephyrus Relocation Services coordinates every part of an employee’s move, from providing packing materials to coordinating international customs forms. Zephyrus relies on Salesforce to manage the data that powers its services. Calvin Green, Zephyrus’s Salesforce admin, has an incredible idea for a Relocation Coordinator agent. The agent will offer personalized relocation guidance and moving package summaries, answer questions about the customer’s relocation policy, and provide real-time updates on shipment locations. Because the Zephyrus production environment has business-critical processes and data, Calvin wants to develop and test the agent in a test environment. Calvin creates a Salesforce sandbox.

What’s a Sandbox?

Salesforce sandboxes are isolated copies of your production environment. They offer a risk-free testing ground for your new projects. They also enable thorough and realistic testing with a replica of your production data.

In addition to testing, you can use sandboxes to:

Isolate customization and development work from your production environment until you’re ready to deploy changes.
Provide a training environment.
Batch individual changes into one deployment to production.

Sandbox Types

Salesforce offers multiple sandbox types with unique development and testing functionalities.

Sandbox Features

Sandboxes offer key features that can enhance your organization’s development and testing. Check out the resources for more details on each one.

Use Selective Sandbox Access to limit sandbox access to only required users in a public group.
Use data storage upgrades for Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes so your sandbox can keep pace with your development needs.
Create a more targeted testing environment by using a sandbox template to control what data is copied from production to the Full sandbox or Partial Copy sandbox.
Sandboxes include DX Inspector, which is a tool for viewing and managing metadata changes across the org.
Test Data Cloud automations, integrations, and workflows in an isolated environment with Data Cloud sandboxes.
Use Agentforce Testing Center with your sandbox to test new agents with a large volume of scenarios and AI-generated test cases.

Sandboxes also support add-on features that enhance the scale and security of your sandbox environment.

Data Mask & Seed automatically masks sensitive data and populates your sandboxes with relevant data that maintains object relationships.
Scale Test enables performance testing of your Salesforce project in an isolated environment with realistic data.

Zephyrus’s New Agent Starts with a Sandbox

Let’s check back in with Calvin, the Salesforce admin for Zephyrus, and his brilliant idea for a new Relocation Coordinator agent.

To build the new agent, Calvin and the Zephyrus team need an isolated environment with the existing customizations in production and some sample data. Calvin creates a Developer Pro sandbox and he uses Data Mask & Seed to populate the new sandbox with records. The Zephyrus development team uses Agent Builder to start creating the Relocation Coordinator agent.

After developing the new agent, Calvin and the Zephyrus team are ready for QA testing. The QA testers need realistic data so they can validate real customer use cases. Calvin creates a Partial Copy sandbox using a sandbox template that copies over only the most relevant objects. To limit access to the data copied to the sandbox, Calvin uses Selective Sandbox Access to grant permissions only to the QA testing team. The QA testers use Agentforce Testing Center to generate and run AI-generated tests at scale.

The QA testers approve the new agent. Now Calvin and the Zephyrus team are ready for end-to-end testing with integrations. Because thorough end-to-end testing requires the full dataset, Calvin creates a Full sandbox. To protect the dataset copied to the sandbox, Calvin enables Data Mask to anonymize sensitive data. He then uses Scale Test to validate that the new agent can handle the increased activity during peak business seasons.

The Relocation Coordinator agent passes end-to-end testing with flying colors! By using sandboxes and their robust features, Calvin and the Zephyrus team can launch the agent to production with confidence.

예상 시간

주제

도움말 검색

Salesforce Platform 자원