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I am currently reasearching means to do black-box testing on managed packages. I want those test to be outside of the packaging/development org to find errors that sometimes do not appear on those orgs.

A flexible testing process would require means to create a fresh org with a defined metadata AND data version. Dev orgs can be created easily but they have minimal storage and populating them with large data volumes by using the standard CSV/dataloader means is anything but not fast.

So, I thought why not use Trialforce templates to create bundles of Package version X.Y and data and just create trialforce org out of this.

My question is:

  1. Did you try this?
  2. What were your experiences?
  3. Can one reset a trial org to make them resusable?
  4. Are there better aproaches and why are they better?
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    As opposed to dev orgs, trial orgs expire and do get tidied up... one might feel less guilty about not reusing them :-)
    – Matt and Neil
    Mar 22, 2013 at 0:09

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I have not tried this, but I believe there is some overhead in creating & setting up Trialforce orgs that maybe you could avoid.

What we do for Geopointe is we have a bunch of demo orgs we created from Partner Portal. Currently, we have...

  • Group Edition
  • Pro Edition
  • Enterprise Edition
  • Enterprise Edition w/ Person Accounts turned on

They all have a set of default data in them. We use those order to perform fresh installs, push upgrades, etc. As long as they are not for customer use, Salesforce lets you keep them. Every year, you need to log a case asking they be re-upped another year.

I will also often create new 30 day trials from salesforce.com using some random @mailinator.com account and test there too.

In addition to those, we use our Production org as a guinea pig org. We do this to handle more real-life data scenarios and to test users of all different authority levels. We want to see, especially in a push upgrade scenario, how the transition is from old to new. Lastly, we use our production system so that, if anyone will have a major issue, we will be the first ones.

Trialforce could be a nice addition. Don't know much about it, but I believe there is overhead involved in getting it setup and you'll need a Managed-Released version of your package rather than the Beta versions.

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    This pretty much reflects our approach, except that we don't test Group or Pro since our package does not support those.
    – kibitzer
    Mar 21, 2013 at 18:38
  • Scott / Dan I highly welcome such renowned comments! One thing I don't get is: how to instantly create a fresh org with version X and data Y with deploying and dataloading. Only trialforce templates seem to give you that.
    – Robert Sösemann
    Mar 22, 2013 at 23:29

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