DTAP-street
The acronym DTAP is short for Development, Testing, Acceptance, and Production. Together these stages describe a phased approach to software testing and deployment, where changes move through one stage at a time before they reach your end users.
DTAP with sandboxes
In Betty Blocks you can create a sandbox of a sandbox. This lets you build several layers, each with its own users and data, so different parties can test new features at the right stage. You make your changes in the deepest layer and merge them upward, one sandbox at a time, until they reach production.
Each stage maps to your application or one of its sandboxes:
- Development — the deepest sandbox. This is where one or more developers make the actual changes. It's a fully functional application, so developers can check that what they build works as intended.
- Testing — the sandbox one layer up. Here the work of multiple developers comes together, so the QA team can test it thoroughly and run any automated tests.
- Acceptance — the next sandbox up. Used for the final sanity checks by the owner or customer of the application, to confirm the new functionality works as expected.
- Production — your application itself. This is the version your end users work with.
So production is the application, acceptance is a sandbox of production, testing is a sandbox of acceptance, and development is a sandbox of testing.
Read more about sandboxes: