ALM and Environment strategy

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Posted on by CU18101220-0

Hi there,

I am about to set up a ALM strategy, but I am hesitating as far as environment type to set for each stage.

There seems to be different trends about the type of env to set depending on the stage.

I was thinking having a 3-stage cycle, i.e Development=>QA=>Production cycle.

So far nothing crazy innovative, right ? :-)

However I see some people are assigning a Production Env for the 3 different steps, while others are going with Sandbox for the Development stage and others assigning a Sandbox for the QA.

Surprisingly, I don't see much people assigning a Dev Env for the Development stage.

I was thinking having a prod env each stage, and an additional Dev environment aside to pretest ideas before doing anything in the Dev Stage.

One of the reason is Dev env does not consume any credit, which allows me to test ideas without being refrained of testing new stuff.

Yet, a Dev Environment cannot be part of a pipeline, but on the other hand I can export it manually to a Sandbox/Production Environment, so I don't see anything precluding me to play around a Dev env.

As you can see I didn't make up my mind.

Any advice ?

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Publish & channel management

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Romain The Low-Code... 2,055 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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ALM and Environment strategy

hello :) the naming of the environnement are confusing.

the "dev" was the named "student" : so i think you will start to understand where is the problem : it have a lot limitation, sharing, feature etc

I use it for "R & D" for my personnel test

the sandbox have a lot of feature for restoring content etc. with appropriate DLP it's a good "dev" environnement.

Q&A et Prod should be "production" environnement because of the few difference about solution management and capability in restore.

And "non official" what i have seen after many year in those environnement, it's a personnal feeling :

the "dev" is slow

the sandbox is "normal" speed

the production have quicker answer time.

it's probably totally wrong but i feel there is not the same perf between prod and dev.

This is a quick opinion writtent nightly :) i hope this help

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Giraldoj 757 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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ALM and Environment strategy

Hi!

There are a few articles related to this topic, including Microsoft’s official recommendations

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/authoring-solutions-overview

From my point of view, Copilot Studio agents rely on Power Platform environments, so there’s no reason to adopt a different ALM strategy. I usually follow this setup:

DEV (Sandbox)

UAT/QA (Sandbox)

PROD (Production)

As Romain mentioned, there have been some changes in development environments. At least in Europe, it’s still named “Development,” so you can give it a try and see if it works for you. However, not consuming credits in DEV isn’t always ideal—you might miss licensing issues or cost implications before deploying to QA.

For UAT, I strongly recommend using a sandbox environment. If something goes wrong, you can’t restore a production environment over itself—you need a sandbox to restore it. In my experience, a lot can happen in QA, and restoring a fresh copy has saved me hours of work.

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Romain The Low-Code... 2,055 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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ALM and Environment strategy

i totally agree with @Giraldoj

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