4.2. Application Lifecycle Management

💡 First Principle: An agent in production is software in production, and ALM is one promise: what you tested is what you shipped. Everything in this section — solutions, environment variables, pipelines — exists to move an exact, reproducible unit of work from dev through test to prod without hand edits along the way.

Hand edits are the villain: every manual tweak in prod is an untested change and an undocumented difference dev can't reproduce. The Power Platform's ALM machinery makes the tested artifact be the deployed artifact, with per-environment differences externalized into configuration.

⚠️ Common Misconception: Exporting and importing agents manually is the recommended ALM approach. Export/import moves a copy; it manages nothing — no dependency tracking, no per-environment configuration, no deployment history. Solutions plus pipelines are the tested path.