Software AG strongly recommends that you upgrade in a controlled test environment and test that environment for proper operation before promoting to your production environment.

Provision new environments to support the upgrade. Environments in which you conduct testing should mirror the production environment.

Obtain test and performance data from the source environment and establish baseline results.

Many upgrade issues are caused by forgotten environmental settings. Plan, document, and test these thoroughly.

Identify test tools for unit, functional, and non-functional regression testing, and for performance and security testing.

Define acceptance and sign off criteria.

Automate a core set of regression tests for the upgrade. Software AG recommends focusing your tests most heavily on product areas that have undergone the most change. The readmes and release notes provide all product change information (see Preparation and Planning for details).

If upgrading to new machines, make sure connections and firewalls are open to back-end systems before starting any system testing.

Use an issue management system to track defects and issues.

If code freeze of the old environment during test is not possible, merge code changes from the old environment into the baseline and re-test the new baseline.