Hotfix Rollout QA Tests

Aaron, We don't truly have a fixed process by which we test new hotfixes, customizations, and other changes in the system, but you've gotten the big one already: always test in the TEST environment (and I say this coming from a guy who's lived dangerously trying things in LIVE first and only had it bite him about 15% of the time). Aside from that, it all comes down to what the hotfixes are going to affect; are they going to be seen on the staff side only so you just need to pick some good staff members to test and give their experiential feedback? Are they going to affect the user experience so you need to identify some good testers on staff (and maybe some favored customers) to see what the hotfix does to the user path on the QA version of your website? For example, our consortium recently had some customization work done by Tessitura so that we can have forms filled out via our TNEW pages and then automatically populated a page on the Custom tab of the constituent. Something like this affects multiple groups of people who engage with our organizations. We have to consider how the process for building the forms works, and whether that is useful for our staff. We have to consider what happens when a form is filled out, and does it come into our database in the manner we wish to see it. And we have to see the custom forms at work on our QA versions of TNEW so that we can evaluate multiple potential user experiences--established and logged-in users, people coming to the website for the first time, and guest/Facebook logins--and see what kind of issues we might dig up as a result. What kind of hotfixes are you looking to apply? Thank you, Brian

Thanks for the good ideas Brian, Is there a list of all of the changes a hotfix effects? Like tables and procedures that are modified? We are now running 12.5.1.216 on our TEST system.

Can I dm you about the details on how to do that? I'd like to be able to report on the changes with that level of granularity.