question

You don't need an official statement, you've seen it work with your own eyes. Amazon only control the data you enter into developer.amazon.com. There is no explicit connection between that and what you might do in Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, or your own personal service. If you want to update your code for development, but not for production, you need to fork your code and deploy a separate lambda function or web endpoint. Then change the endpoint for your development skill to the new one. They will be kept separate. When your skill is approved, the public will be using the new endpoint, and you can take down the old one. And, yes, this is a huge "end-run" around certification. And this is one of the huge problems with certification. The current certification process attempts to validate all sorts of things that are in the web app, not the certification page. But that's a point in time thing. You can change the web app at any point. So it is pretty much a waste of time and effort for Amazon to expend energy certifying things that can arbitrarily change. Personally I would like to see Amazon update its certification process and remove anything that has to do with the web app. For Starlanes I've managed to add significant new features without having to go through certification. Given how long it takes to certify (months, for Starlanes), I really want to be able to update my skill frequently. Given that "Agile" is the most commonly used development process, their current approach is antiquated. When I post an app to AWS, they don't QA it for me, dictate my user interface, or have some graduated-six-months-ago try to school a professional-developer-for-thirty-years on development methodology. They just want to know "is this going to break the system". In my opinion, that's what certification should be about.

Thank you for the comprehensive response. Your response makes sense, too, because if I was hosting a service on my own web architecture, I could change the code there and Amazon would have no way of knowing it happened.

Hi Michael, This is correct. At this time, modifications to intents and utterances will require you to resubmit, whereas any changes to your back end services are to the developer for testing and verifying. This is similar to deploying web apps on app stores, where developers are ultimately in control of the content displayed after submission. Thanks, Justin