The degree audit system (IDA 2.0) operates in three different environments. This is an overview of what those environments are and what they are used for.
Production:
The production environment (Prod) is the most stable of the environments. This is where the student record lives and can be considered a live environment in. Changes here are real time and are immediately visible to anyone. If a student pass/fails a class today, then it will show up in the degree audit, on their schedule, and any other system that is reading the Prod environment.
Quality Assurance:
The quality assurance environment (Qual), is stable but one month behind the Prod environment. This is where tests are performed for new features or functionality before they are moved to production. The data from production is moved once a month, generally the third Saturday of each month, back into Qual and is static from that point forward. Therefore, if a student pass/fails a class today in Prod, it will not show up until the next Qual refresh is performed. Changes to data in this environment are not moved into production and are overwritten at the next refresh of the data.
Test:
The test environment is the least stable environment. This is where the analysts make all the changes to the code before they move them into the qual environment. Data is copied from production but only in specific batches. Once functionality is tested in this environment, is it moved into qual for further testing with more data.
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