This article explains why you'll sometimes see incorrect information in the Changed on and Changed by fields displayed in the Gearset metadata comparison results table or in your org change monitoring results.

There are two main reasons for incorrect Changed on information:

Changed on dates for metadata in Salesforce are updated when users make manual changes to an item. They are not updated by automated processes such as sandbox refreshes or platform releases (both discussed in further detail below).

In some cases, the Changed on date will display the time of the comparison, and the Changed by field will display the username of the Salesforce user running the comparison. In both cases, this information is likely to be incorrect. This is not a bug in Gearset, but unfortunately a limitation of the Salesforce Metadata API.  (This is discussed in further detail later on in this article.)

The most common example of the Changed on information being incorrect is following a refresh of a sandbox from another org.

When you refresh an org through Salesforce, changes in the source org are moved over to the target org to bring them back in sync. This process works differently to a normal deployment in Salesforce. When an org is refreshed like this, Salesforce does not update the Changed on information for any components that are moved.

Let's take an example to show how this works:

The other main cause of erroneous Changed on is Salesforce platform releases (e.g. Summer '18 > Winter '19). If a platform release introduces new features or modifies metadata, this will not affect their Changed on information.

For example, the org below has been updated from Summer '18 (v43) to Winter '19 (v44) of the Metadata API. As a result, several objects have been changed, but their Changed on dates are still showing the date those objects were manually edited by users in the org.

There is a bug in the Salesforce Metadata API that means sometimes Salesforce returns incorrect Changed on information for an item. This bug can affect a range of different items, but is most commonly seen in the workflow and custom object metadata types.

In fact, if you have access to Workbench, you can try this yourself. 

Below is an example workflow being queried using Workbench. This retrieval was run on the 31st August 2018 at 9:39 am. You can see that Salesforce returns the current time for both lastModifiedDate and createdDate, and not the actual times you'll see if you log into the Salesforce UI.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this bug.

If you want to confirm the Changed on and Changed by for any item, you can log into the Salesforce org in question and check in the UI, although this will still be subject to the provisions mentioned above about what alters the date.

Understanding what causes the Changed on information to be updated explains why you may sometimes see unexpected results in an org change monitoring job in Gearset.

For example, if you had a change monitoring job running against a sandbox that is subsequently refreshed from production, the next snapshot after your sandbox refresh will track any changes as differences.

When you look at the results of the job, you may see that the Changed on dates for your differences are outside of the date the snapshot was taken.

This can initially be confusing, but hopefully this article explains why you may see these changes and what the cause of them is.