The best practice for development is to add three environments. One that is for development, one for testing, and the production environment. It is important that the development and the QA environments have the same objects as production, and the QA environment has the similar load as the production.

Import and Export of environments: Enterprise Import and Export Gateway.

Setting Up a Development and QA Environment

• Stop production runs on the source and destination servers. You do this by making the Production Equipment Model inactive in Equipment Manager.
  
  
• Take a full backup of the production environment: gateway backup and database backup
  
  
• Use either the Enterprise Gateway Import/Export or Sync functions to build the QA and development servers.
  • If you use the Import/Export tools, import the <filename>.changelog file to the QA or development system.