Prompt:
What is a pipeline development lifecycle in Apache Beam?
Response:

The Apache Beam pipeline development lifecycle is an iterative process that usually involves the following steps:

- Design your pipeline.
- Develop your pipeline code.
- Test your pipeline.
- Deploy your pipeline.

During each iteration, you might need to go back and forth between the different steps to refine your pipeline code and to fix bugs.

To design a pipeline, you need answers to the following questions:
- Where is the data stored?
- What does the data look like?
- What do you want to do with your data?
- What does your output data look like, and where should it go?

Beam documentation has more information about [pipeline design](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/pipelines/design-your-pipeline/) and about common [pipeline patterns](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/patterns/overview/).


An Apache Beam program expresses a data processing pipeline, from start to finish. To construct a pipeline using the classes in the Apache Beam SDKs, your program needs to perform the following steps:

- Create a `Pipeline` object.
- Use a `Read` or `Create` transform to create one or more `PCollection` objects for your pipeline data.
- Apply transforms to each `PCollection`.
- Write or otherwise output the final, transformed `PCollection` objects.
- Run the pipeline.

The Apache Beam documentation has more information about [developing](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/programming-guide/) and [executing](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/pipelines/create-your-pipeline/) pipelines.

Testing pipelines is a particularly important step in developing an effective data processing solution. The indirect nature of the Beam model, in which your user code constructs a pipeline graph to be executed remotely, can make debugging-failed runs difficult. For more information about pipeline testing strategies, see [Test Your Pipeline](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/pipelines/test-your-pipeline/).

Choosing a [runner](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/#choosing-a-runner) is a crucial step in deploying your pipeline. The runner you choose determines where and how your pipeline executes.
For more information about pipeline deployment, see [Container environments](https://beam.apache.org/documentation/runtime/environments/).
