I posted this on Yammer and Business Central support and was told I should make this suggestion here. Even if it's a paid option, we should at least have this option. Copying to a sandbox is an amazing feature, ISV's just need a few more of them. Working in a whole other Tenant, or with Docker Hub, or Azure VM, or on Prem doesn't work nearly as well as having more sandboxes. It's all about the data. Here's the situation:

Large Vertical Extension Workflow with 6 developers and only 3 sandboxes.

We have a 20 year old vertical that is now a single extension and 6 developers actively working on bug fixes and new functionality.

Our workflow in c/side was obviously very different, mainly because developers could coordinate and work in different objects and testers tested all in the same DB. Then periodically that DB was released as a new version.

For the extension, we pretty much have the workflow down when it comes to the code itself, you create a new branch, you code the fix or new function in that branch, once tested, you do a pull request back into master and it’s available for the next release.

The problem comes with the sandboxes. It seems like the structure of the tenants, 1 production DB and 3 sandboxes are perfect for the clients, but not for an ISV at all. First, we can’t use the Production DB at all, because that can’t be updated with our ISV extension until it’s released to App Source (I know this particular problem might be fixed in the next version where we can have prereleases posted to App Source). So we currently use the first sandbox for testing. We can’t have developers publish to this sandbox however with branch versions of the extension because they will be overwriting each other. So no problem, that’s what the other sandboxes are for. Copy the first sandbox to another and the developer publishes the branched extension to that where it can then be tested. But the problem is there’s only 2 more sandboxes and 6 developers.

Current Roadblocks:

1. There isn't a way to purchase more sandboxes for a single tenant. This would be our ideal solution.
2. If we purchase a new tenant there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily copy a sandbox from one tenant to another. The reason why this is so important is because data is so important. Most bugs are data related and for new functionality, testers often spend hours or days setting up data. So that data really needs to be setup in one place, where (like branches) sandboxes can just easily be created from and deleted when done.

We're currently setting up onPrem Dev Sandbox DB's and dealing with the Data issue. Another Tenant or Azure VMs are way too expensive. Docker Hub seems like it would be another lengthy process sharing containers between testers and developers.

Thank you,

Jim Welch