When deploying P6 components, Oracle recommends maintaining non-production environments in addition to your production environment. Non-production environments are typically known as: Development Environment, Testing Environment, and Staging Environment. Non-production environments allow you to safely test and integrate changes into the system. These changes could include software upgrades, version upgrades, platform and operating system upgrades, configuration changes, and adding new modules. A general description of each environment is shown below. You may choose to maintain only some of them based on the size of your deployment; however, you should consider all of them when setting up your system.
Development Environment
In-house developers or administrators should use development environments to deploy components to develop integrations or proof-of-concept projects.
Testing Environment
Use the testing environment to validate new features of upgraded components, configuration setting changes, or regression testing of existing features.
Staging Environment
This environment is very similar to the Production Environment because it contains all (or mostly all) deployed components of the system. Use it for further testing so you can resolve any integration issues before going live to the Production Environment.
Production Environment (required)
This is the environment where users actually do their work and contains all deployed components of the system.