Development, testing, acceptance and production (DTAP)
is a phased approach to
software testing
Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations.
Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the Quality (business), quality of software and the risk of its failure to a User (computin ...
and
deployment. The four letters in DTAP denote the following common steps:
# Development: The program or component is developed on a development system. This
development environment might have no testing capabilities.
# Testing: Once the
software developer
Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...
thinks it is ready, the product is copied to a test environment, to verify it works as expected. This test environment is supposedly standardized and in close alignment with the target environment.
# Acceptance: If the test is successful, the product is copied to an acceptance test environment. During the
acceptance test
In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests.
In systems eng ...
, the customer will test the product in this environment to verify whether it meets their expectations.
# Production: If the customer accepts the product, it is deployed to a production environment, making it available to all users of the system.
The set of environments used for a DTAP cycle is often called a DTAP street.
The set of environments can be smaller or larger, depending on the demands of the project. Examples of other steps are:
# Education – This extension of the DTAP-street is a training environment for the users of the production environment.
# Backup – The
backup site is used for
disaster recovery
IT disaster recovery (also, simply disaster recovery (DR)) is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle. DR employs policies, tools, ...
.
Though the methodology is called DTAP, some projects might use DTAPB, DTP, DTEP or any other variant addressing the project needs.
See also
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Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed ...
*
Deployment environment
In software deployment, an environment or tier is a computer system or set of systems in which a computer program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), e ...
*
Release management
Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; it includes testing and deploying software releases.
Relationship with processes
Organizations that ...
*
Software testing
Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations.
Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the Quality (business), quality of software and the risk of its failure to a User (computin ...
References
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Software development process