As you will start working with Salesforce CRM you will hear about some development jargon like Dev, Sandbox, Production. In this post we will go through about Environment and Salesforce Development environment.

What is Environment

In Salesforce terms an instance of the Force.com platform is an environment and is also called an organization, which is frequently shortened to org. Throughout this article, environments and organizations will be used interchangeably. in other terms when any customer purchase Salesforce License to start using Salesforce, Salesforce follow development process from Development to Production ready code. Code goes through different development stages before PROD deployment. Let’s go through the different Salesforce Development environment.

  1. Production Org :

    1. Production org is the org which is used by Business users to run their business.
    2. This org contains real time data from Business User.
    3. Salesforce login url is http://login.salesforce.com
    4. Developer can’t modify code in this org.
    5. We push code from UAT to this Environment.
    6. You shouldn’t create dummy/test data in this org

  2. UAT or Sandbox :

    1. UAT stands for User Acceptance Testing.
    2. Salesforce login url is http://test.salesforce.com
    3. This is copy of Production Org in terms of code and data.
    4. This org is used to test functionality prior to used by end business users.
    5. If any code is working here it means that it will work on PROD org as well.
    6. You can create dummy/test data.
    7. One Production org can have a UAT env.

  3. Dev Org :

    1. Dev stands for Developer org.
    2. Salesforce login url is http://test.salesforce.com
    3. This is copy of Production Org in terms of code when first created.
    4. Developer can create dummy data here.
    5. One Production org can have multiple Dev env..

How to Identify which environment is this :

Once you logged in any org you can check UAT, Dev from the top right corner as shown in below screenshot.

dev-env

 

Code Migration best Practices :

You should follow below code migration process every time you are going to do development.

Dev ⇒ UAT ⇒ PROD

  1. Develop code in Dev Org.
  2. Test in Dev Org.
  3. Migrate to UAT Org.
  4. Test in Dev Org with QA (Quality analyst).
  5. Complete User Acceptance testing with Business Users.
  6. Deploy on PROD.

Happy Coding!!!