What is the simplest way to build a QA and Demo environment for Salesforce?

Question

At the moment our developer workflows uses Sandbox as development branches and from Sandboxes developers push straight to production. We have now additional requirements:

• Have a QA environment
• Have a DEMO environment which replicates production

For the first issue, we could simply force all developers to push from branch instances to QA instance and then to production, while for DEMO environment we could simply "refresh" a sandbox.

The problem we have, however, is that we would need to preserve the data in the instances, while upgrading the metadata, therefore Sandbox refresh doesn't really work. What way we have to copy ALL the production metadata to other instances?

Answer 1

In my company we have Developpers pushing to QA sandbox and then to Preproduction and then production environnement.

One big issue we have, when the "sprint" is finished, and all the "sprint" content is on the production organization, we start refreshing all sandboxes.

Developpers like me are bored because each time we have a refresh, we loose our tests records etc...

At this time, the only way I found to keep some data is to create a "custom anonymous code" that create multiple record. In one execution I have some records with datas. It's the fast way I found. (As a developer, I update my script each time I add some fields, object etc...). This is the fastest way I found ! In one copy/paste on the developer console and...voila :)

The other way is to load data via Data Loader (extract and import). Extract from your QA environnement and load it to other sandboxes.

Good luck :)

Answer 2

The new way to do this is to use Salesforce DX. You can quickly spin up an org using a shell script that would look something like this:

sfdx force:org:create -f definitions/enterprise.json -s -a $1
sfdx force:src:push
sfdx force:data:tree:import -p data/data-plan.json

Which you would then call from your terminal:

./sfdx-create-org some-org-alias

You'll want to read the documentation for full details, of course, but the idea is that you can quickly spin up orgs for development, QA, and UAT.

If you want to use DX with Sandboxes, you can still take advantage of force:data:tree:import to quickly regenerate your data after you refresh by using something like the following:

sfdx force:org:web:login -r https://test.salesforce.com/ -s
sfdx force:data:tree:import -p data/data-plan.json

You can, of course, make them more or less complicated as you desire, but this should help you with your problem.