Is there an automated way to set up my development account to look just like my live account? I want my development account to have all the customization of our real account so that when I test sforce operations I will be testing against a reasonable facsimile of our actual SalesForce.com account.

In a related question, what are considered best practices for testing and deploying sforce solutions to SalesForce.com accounts? I am used to working on systems that we have full control over. For these systems we have complete duplicates of the production systems dedicated for development, QC testing and acceptance testing. Only after a change or new product has passed through all three levels do we release it to production.

However, from what I have seen so far, development with sforce means working on a small development account, which may or may not duplicate the structure of the real account depending on the answer to my first question, but which certainly doesn't contain a complete copy or even a large subset of the live data. Then the next step is deployment straight to the live account. It feels like working without a net to me, so I would appreciate any advice on how others manage their development and testing cycle.

Thanks in advance.