In the Microsoft Power Platform, there is a concept of patching solutions. Patches are useful when you want to deploy code from one environment to another. With patches, you would have already released a solution from one environment to another, and then be in a situation where you need to deploy a fix or enhancement to that solution.

Instead of updating the original solution and deploying that full solution again, the concept of patches was introduced to enable us to deploy only what has changed. We could create a new small solution with only the code we need to deploy without creating a patch, but the nice feature of patches is they are tracked back to the original solution, so we can ultimately roll these changes back into the base solution.

Patches are also layered on top of the original solution, which is important in terms of the predictability of code deployments. This is especially handy if you are creating an app or ISV code, or are keeping a close eye on what is deployed in your production organizations. Patches should be faster to deploy as you are only deploying part of a solution, and individual developers can deploy patches instead of waiting for other devs to complete functionality.