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zrxc77 How to duplicate live environment in development account
Is there an automated way to set up my development account to look just like my live account? I want my development account to have all the customization of our real account so that when I test sforce operations I will be testing against a reasonable facsimile of our actual SalesForce.com account.
In a related question, what are considered best practices for testing and deploying sforce solutions to SalesForce.com accounts? I am used to working on systems that we have full control over. For these systems we have complete duplicates of the production systems dedicated for development, QC testing and acceptance testing. Only after a change or new product has passed through all three levels do we release it to production.
However, from what I have seen so far, development with sforce means working on a small development account, which may or may not duplicate the structure of the real account depending on the answer to my first question, but which certainly doesn't contain a complete copy or even a large subset of the live data. Then the next step is deployment straight to the live account. It feels like working without a net to me, so I would appreciate any advice on how others manage their development and testing cycle.
Thanks in advance.
In a related question, what are considered best practices for testing and deploying sforce solutions to SalesForce.com accounts? I am used to working on systems that we have full control over. For these systems we have complete duplicates of the production systems dedicated for development, QC testing and acceptance testing. Only after a change or new product has passed through all three levels do we release it to production.
However, from what I have seen so far, development with sforce means working on a small development account, which may or may not duplicate the structure of the real account depending on the answer to my first question, but which certainly doesn't contain a complete copy or even a large subset of the live data. Then the next step is deployment straight to the live account. It feels like working without a net to me, so I would appreciate any advice on how others manage their development and testing cycle.
Thanks in advance.
I've looked through all the setup and customization tabs, and while I find tools for importing/exporting data, I can't find anything for importing/exporting customized objects, fields, tabs, etc.
Should I just do all development on the live site?
Hi zrxc77,
We do not currently have any way for you to programattically apply customizations from one account to the other. We see this as a useful (is that a strong enough term?) capability of the platform and are working to provide that functionality in the future.
In the mean time, you and I will have to click click click.
zrxc 77,
After a few passes at copying things, I've found it easier to do my development on the live site most of the time. I've allocated an additional user as my "test user". This user has a small set of accounts which I use for experimentation, using opportunity dates in 2011 so they won't show up on any summary reports. By making different record types and/or different page layouts for this user, I can do most things without impacting production use.
I go back to the development site only when I'm trying something that has a higher risk-factor. (For example, testing the use of a bulk update tool).
It's a compromise, but so far it's worked. (knock on wood).
Scot