The development environment is the earliest stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC). It is where the code is first written and tested. The development environment is typically installed locally on a system that allows the developer to easily assess the code and make changes. To facilitate rapid development and testing, the development environment typically uses dummy data. Dummy data is data that is not real but is used to represent real data. This allows the developer to focus on the code and not have to worry about the data.