Recommended practices when upgrading or making changes

When you upgrade or make changes to IXIASOFT CCMS, ensure you test them on a non-production environment.

Since each deployment is different, you should attempt the changes on a separate environment not used for production. This environment is often referred to as a test environment. The purpose of making changes in a test environment first is to learn what is needed to adapt the general instructions provided by IXIASOFT to the specific requirements in your deployment. The goal is to produce a set of procedures documenting specifically what you need to do to your production environment.

After you have confirmed that the procedures are correct and the changes are approved, then they can be applied to the production environment. This might mean that you give the procedures to your corporate IT department to implement or you might be responsible for implementing the changes yourself.

Although this might seem to be redundant work, it is standard practice in IT which serves to reduce the risk of disrupting the production environment.

Example testing workflow

At the bare minimum, a deployment consists of two environments:

  • A production environment on which the users are working
  • A test environment on which modifications, upgrades, or updates are tested before being performed on the production environment itself
Figure: Example of a typical deployment
Example of a typical deployment

In the test environment you experiment with modifications and perform trials of upgrades and updates to determine what is required for your production environment. This environment allows you to experiment without fear of breaking something since you can easily fix or replace the environment without affecting your users in the production environment.

Once you have this set of procedures, you need to test them on a copy of your production environment to verify and confirm that the instructions are complete and correct, the changes were applied successfully in the environment, and that you have not broken something (caused a regression) as a result of the changes. This environment is referred to as a validation environment, although not all deployments have such an envirorment.

Once the procedure is tested and approved, you might then hand it off to the IT department who will run checks on the test environment before applying the changes to the production environment or you might apply the changes to production yourself depending on who is responsible for maintaining it.

So, each modification, upgrade, or update might follow this process:

  1. Experiment and document: You experiment with the changes on the test environment until you are satisfied with the results and you have documented a complete procedure for implementing the changes in your production environment.
  2. Test: You perform the procedure on the test environment to check whether the procedure is correct, the changes are applied correctly and no regressions occur.
  3. Implement: you or the IT specialist follows the procedure to apply the changes to the production environment.