Development Environment
A Development Environment in Salesforce is any org used for building and testing features before production deployment, including sandboxes, scratch orgs, or Developer Edition orgs.
Definition
A Development Environment in Salesforce is any org used for building and testing features before production deployment, including sandboxes, scratch orgs, or Developer Edition orgs. These isolated environments allow safe experimentation without affecting production users or data.
In plain English
“A Development Environment is any Salesforce org where you build and test features before pushing them to production. That includes sandboxes, Scratch Orgs, and Developer Edition orgs. The point is to keep your experiments isolated from production users and data.”
Worked example
Verge Software's release pipeline uses three kinds of Development Environments. Engineers build new features in disposable scratch orgs spun up via Salesforce DX, each pre-configured with the team's metadata and seeded test data. Once a feature is ready, it merges into a Developer sandbox where four other features integrate together. From there it moves to a Full Copy sandbox for QA against a recent production data snapshot. Production never sees code that hasn't been validated in at least these three Development Environments. Combined with a CI pipeline that auto-deploys between them, the team ships every two weeks without manual hand-offs and without ever testing directly in production.
Why Development Environment matters
A Development Environment in Salesforce is any org used for building and testing changes before they reach production. The category includes Developer Sandboxes, Developer Pro Sandboxes, Partial Copy Sandboxes, Full Sandboxes, Scratch Orgs, and Developer Edition orgs. Each has different characteristics around data, refresh frequency, and lifecycle, but they all share the core purpose: providing safe space to develop and test without affecting production users or data.
Choosing the right development environment depends on what you're trying to do. Scratch Orgs are great for ephemeral work like CI/CD pipelines and short-lived feature branches. Developer Sandboxes work as per-developer workspaces. Developer Pro Sandboxes provide more test data storage. Partial Copy and Full sandboxes give you realistic production data for integration testing and UAT. Developer Edition orgs are free standalone orgs for personal projects. Most mature Salesforce teams use a mix, with each environment type serving different purposes in the development lifecycle.
How organizations use Development Environment
Maintains a tiered set of development environments: Scratch Orgs for feature work, a Developer Pro Sandbox for integration testing, a Partial Copy for UAT, and a Full sandbox for performance testing.
Standardized on Scratch Orgs as their primary development environment for individual feature work, with sandboxes for integration and UAT phases.
Uses Developer Edition orgs for individual experimentation outside of any client work, keeping personal projects isolated from production environments.
Trust & references
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Development Environment.
- Sandbox Types and TemplatesSalesforce Help
Test your knowledge
Q1. What counts as a Development Environment?
Q2. Why use development environments?
Q3. What's the modern environment type for ephemeral feature work?
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