The SAP System Landscape 

To protect your productive system from unwanted or faulty changes, we recommend that you take special care in separating your development system from your productive system. Define policies and procedures for making changes and transporting them into your productive system. Avoid making changes in your productive system!

In regard to your system landscape, we suggest a three-tier system that consists of separate development, quality assurance, and productive systems. The three systems share a common transport directory. With this setup, you can thoroughly make and test changes without interfering with your productive operations. The graphic below shows our recommended three-tier system landscape.

When using the Transport Management System (TMS; transaction STMS), you no longer need to manually set-up a common transport directory and you can also start imports from within the SAP System. For more information, see Transport Management System (BC-CTS-TMS).

Recommended Three-Tier System Landscape