How many environments does Appian recommend supporting the application development lifecycle with at minimum?

Appian recommends having a minimum of three environments to effectively support the application development lifecycle. These environments typically include development, testing (or quality assurance), and production.

The development environment is where new applications are created, and developers can experiment and make changes without affecting other users. The testing environment is crucial for validating those changes in an isolated setting, allowing for thorough testing, quality assurance checks, and feedback collection before deployment. Finally, the production environment is where the fully tested and approved applications are deployed for actual use by end-users.

Having these three distinct environments helps to ensure a smoother development process, minimizes risks of deploying untested changes, and maintains the integrity of the production system by providing structured stages where applications can be developed, tested, and implemented in a controlled manner. This separation promotes best practices in DevOps and agile methodologies, facilitating continuous integration and delivery.