How Seeding Accuracy Helps to Choose the Right Salesforce Customizations

Are you sure that your Salesforce Sandbox is an accurate mirror image of your live production org? Or, poor data mapping is diluting the seeding accuracy for your test environments?

Inaccurate mapping of object hierarchy while seeding Salesforce sandboxes, disrupts the data lineage, increasing the chances of misclassification.

It can be that expense tracker or doc gen application from AppExchange you wanted to deploy. And, based on your use case, it should be fetching data from open cases, which turned out to be doing exactly the opposite, soon after you made it live in Salesforce. 

It’s not the application that is faulty, but it’s the configuration that went wrong but has passed the test cases, in your Sandbox environment. 

In short – Creating a Flimsy Test Set → Dettered Analysis → Wrong Conclusions→  Bad Decisions. 

When you are planning to bring innovations live, as a solutions architect you cannot sit out on your decisions. Before deploying applications to Salesforce like backups; where maintaining data integrity is key, it’s best to set up necessary checkpoints while seeding data from the live org to sandboxes and back.

Here are a few tips on how you can fix the quality issues of your seed data to maximize the accuracy of the output while minimizing errors. 

Key Checks for Seeding Accuracy in Staging Salesforce Environments for Customization & Testing 

The importance of data seeding accuracy is to ideally sample your production data in a test environment which can be Sandbox or any business org in Salesforce. To enhance seeding accuracy during staging environments for Salesforce customization and testing, these checkpoints can help. 

• Verifying Object Relationships – Data seeds should memorize the roots object details when migrated to a sandbox environment
• Validate Metadata Linked to Seed Data – Root object details preserve the identity of link objects, critical to replicating real-world usage

• Should Pass Relevancy Check – Applying filters for condition seeding based targetted test objectives 
• Ensure Data Recency – The freshness of  seed data allows realistic testing on new integrations & applications in Salesforce
• Applied Steps for Authentication – Ensure permission to seed data from Salesforce live production to restrict confidentiality breach

Following the above data-seeding best practices in Salesforce, you can also stage your Salesforce orgs, as well as any Sandboxes for backup testing with DataArchiva. Multi-org seeding is different from traditional sandbox seeding as it supports multi-directional process flow with diverse objectives to set up an effective backup process for Salesforce.  

How DataArchiva’s Org-2-Org Seeding Is Ideal for In-app Backup Testing in Salesforce

Seeding accuracy in Salesforce demands further tightness to ensure data quality. Salesforce platform data often contains complex data sets, hence feed systems need to be more precise to preserve the data relationships to minimize the risk.

Therefore DataArchiva was a little ahead of others in having the best architecture in place to introduce O2O seeding capability for its Salesforce data backup solution. O2O or org-to-org seeding is slightly different from Sandbox seeding allowing users to create multi-object recipes to seed multiple orgs across Salesforce. 

O2O can conversely be applied to its O3 capabilities when out-of-sync Salesforce orgs can be a common problem! 

When launching a cloud replication process as a multi-org seeding application for Salesforce, it’s crucial to focus on the following three “O’s” to maintain seeding accuracy & quality while transmitting data:

1) Order: Data integrity can be maintained by ensuring the correct order during data transmission. Ensure that data is transferred in the appropriate sequence, especially if there are dependencies between different data sets. For example, when replicating Salesforce data, you should consider replicating parent records before child records to maintain referential integrity, which is completely taken care of by DataArchiva Backup.

2) Overhead: Minimize data overhead or any unnecessary additions, transformations, or conversions during the replication process. The more you modify data during transmission across Salesforce, the greater the risk of data corruption or errors. DataArchiva ensures the data transmission process in Salesforce the Org-to-Org seeding is as efficient as possible, only including the necessary data, and avoids introducing unnecessary complexity.

3) Oversight: Implement thorough oversight and monitoring mechanisms to ensure Salesforce data integrity. The app follows a series of process checkboxes for authentication of the target org, metadata validation checks, logs, and error-handling procedures in Salesforce. DataArchiva provides a complete process history of seeding logs with a proper reporting system to notify Salesforce administrators of any anomalies or discrepancies during the process of data transmission.

By focusing on Order, Overhead, and Oversight (the 3 ‘O’s), our Salesforce data seeding capability of DataArchiva Backup can help maintain data integrity while transmitting data between Salesforce orgs, ensuring that the data is transmitted accurately reflects the source data and is consistently reliable. 

Read More: Transform Your Salesforce Application into a Data Playground with DataArchiva’s Data Seeding Solutions

For more details, you can schedule a one-on-one product demo here. 

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