Sandboxes and change sets
As Salesforce continued to mature, the need to be able to safely make changes outside of production and move them across when ready became obvious. However, the pace of DevOps innovation did not seem to keep up with the rise of Salesforce as a development platform.
Sandboxes were introduced in the winter 2006 release, allowing customers to try out changes and enhancements in a safe environment away from production – but with a catch. The original implementation of sandboxes did not allow you to move those changes back to production, meaning that you had to recreate those changes again in your production environment manually. This would be both time-consuming and error-prone.
In recognition of this shortcoming, change sets were initially introduced in beta for the winter 2010 release, some four years after sandboxes, and finally, they became generally available in the Spring 2011 release. Change sets finally allowed the code and configuration work...
