Multiple environments serve different testing purposes.
- Developer sandboxes — feature dev; metadata only.
- Developer Pro — feature dev with sample data.
- Partial Copy — UAT with subset of production data.
- Full Sandbox — staging, performance, full UAT.
- Production — live; not for testing.
Refresh discipline:
- Refresh kills in-flight changes; coordinate.
- Frequent refresh keeps environment current.
Per-environment data:
- Test data factories for unit tests.
- Anonymised production data for UAT.
- Synthetic high-volume for performance.
Common pitfalls:
- One shared sandbox — collisions.
- Refresh during UAT — destroys progress.
- No refresh strategy — environments drift.
Senior insight: environments are infrastructure. Plan thoughtfully.