Landscape Patterns for Transport Types 
Before starting with executing transports, you should consider which transport types you require in your landscape and which ones are suitable for your situation. The following transport types are available:
This is available for standard scenarios, such as customer modifications to SAP applications (for example, Employee Self-Service (ESS)/Customer Relationship Management (CRM)) and for customer-own developments.
SCA and SDA Transports Using the Export Service
The SCA transport is available for transporting defined development states or larger changes. You should only use SDA transports using the Export Service in exceptional cases.
This is provided for transporting smaller source changes. You must use this method in exceptional cases only.
Note
You can specify the transport types most suited to you when configuring the development configuration in the Configuration Service. For this you have to decide whether you want to execute activity-based SDA transports or activity transports. You can execute SCA transports using the Export Service in parallel to this or use them exclusively (without activity-based SDA or activity transports).