Pipeline Deployment - Dev to Test to Prod

Hi Power Apps Community:

I need to better understand how to deploy apps to production. I have developed a Model Driven app using Dataverse tables. I have read articles and watched videos but these only cover an initial deployment. What about when you need to make updates? I cannot find information that helps me understand:

I create a test environment, and my test users test the app and add data – then I need to provide another update to their test environment with new changes based on their feedback. These changes are to forms, views, power automate, data table structure etc. When I re-deploy the new changes to the test environment, are all of these changes updated from dev to test? What about for the data table structure - (I need to add some fields or new tables based on test user feedback) What about the test data they entered – is it lost each time I re-create the test environment? Do I need to re-load data every time I update the test environment?
Once I get to production, what happens when I want to make updates to the solution? Each time I make updates and changes, is the data lost? This is a new app for our company and I expect to continually improve the app over the next year while we are using across the company in a production environment.

What are the best practices for how to do this without losing the data each time and so we can continually improve the solution (perhaps quarterly updates)?

Thanks for any help or reference articles you may provide.

Categories:

General Questions

Hi there,

Solution pipeline works in a CI/CD method. You use a development environment to build your solutions and deploy to test for feedback.

Once you receive feedback, you then make improvements again in the development environment and deploy again to test for feedback.

If there are no feedback, you can deploy your solution to production.

To answer your questions.

When you deploy the solution again from Dev to Test, the solution components are updated to the new version via a merge. Data structure is also updated to new version. However, it doesn't impact the data that you have in your test environment.
When you make updates to your solution by deploying a new version of the solution from Dev to Prod, your solution gets upgraded but your data remains the same.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!