Imagine you need to make changes to an application that has many users who rely on it to get their work done. Anything from a help desk application you use every day, to an asset tracking application keeping your factory running, to an order tracking application that directly impacts your revenue stream—these are all processes critical to your business.

How can you implement changes to your applications without accidentally disrupting your entire business operation? The solution is simple: incorporating Sandbox as part of your application lifecycle management strategy.

What is Sandbox?

A Sandbox is an integral part of your Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategy that enables you to build, change, verify, and release applications in a controlled and safe environment without disrupting the rest of your business. Using a sandbox is a best practice for application development. It allows you to be agile—supporting your need to quickly innovate as well as create, configure, and share your essential apps with various stakeholders, before deploying them to a wider complete user community. Sandbox enables verification with either a copy of the data or even live data input.

Why do you even need a Sandbox?

There are three primary reasons you need a Sandbox:

1. Minimize risk
2. Collaborate on changes with key stakeholders before deploying to production
3. Verify governance best practices and requirements of your IT organization

Minimize Risk

Sandbox allows you to be agile while also ensuring correct change management best practices with business-critical applications. Eliminate disruptions to your team’s workflows by incorporating Sandbox for speed and flexibility in a changing business environment so departments can run smoothly. Facilitate the continuous iteration of applications in a safe and governed way to maximize employee productivity when deploying changes and minimize risk.

Collaborate on changes with key stakeholders before deploying to production

Sandbox provides a separate, protected environment where different developers can make changes. Different stakeholders can be given access so they can provide input and verify their requirements quickly and easily. With an ever-changing competitive landscape there is a constant need to adapt and transform your business. Empower those closest to their unique processes to improvise and improve on current processes based on their own creativity, which makes the work you and your teams do easier and simpler.

Verify governance best practices and requirements of your IT organization

Sandbox enables greater cooperation with the core IT team. It can be used to implement their best practices on application development and governance. In this protected environment, the impact to the business is minimized when changes are made. Sandbox allows you to create a process that works for you, your teams, and IT.

Sandbox based development is a best practice that should be adopted by application developers regardless of the size or complexity of their application.

At Quickbase we’ve launched a new Sandbox and an effective ALM strategy to help solve business problems faster by allowing those in the front lines to create and execute on their own change management processes with the best practices and requirements of IT.