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davidr0007
davidr0007
September 15, 2023
Question

When upgrading Appian, how do you test the upgrade and continue your normal development and deployment lifecycle simultaneously?

  • September 15, 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 0 views

We have 3 cloud based environments: DEV, QC & Production.

When the Appian platform is being upgraded on the cloud, we can schedule the date/time it happens for each environment.

General good practice is that you should upgrade your non-production environments first. After a period of regression testing on those environments, you upgrade your production environment.

Now, if we upgrade our non-development environments first for a period of a week to give the developers and software testers time to do their regression testing, we cannot deploy any new features or bug fixes to production during this time as the Appian versions on DEV/QC are different to Production. This is a major problem if during that week of testing a critical bug is found in production that needs to be fixed and deployed to production ASAP.

How do you all handle this?

5 replies

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
September 15, 2023

Use four environments. DEV, QC, ACC, PROD

ACC first (Code equals PROD)

QC

DEV & PROD

Using only three:

QC (Patch to PROD directly from DEV, not great, but we talk about a severe major issue)

DEV

PROD

    mathieud0001
    mathieud0001
    September 15, 2023

    Every place I've been in has 4 environments.

    Dev

    Test

    Staging

    Production

    Upgrade gets done on test first. We do 1 week of regressions. If tests pass, we then do staging, prod, dev in short order in that sequence.

    Staging environment is available the whole time for hot fixes in production.

      davidr0007
      davidr0007Author
      September 15, 2023

      Thank you both for the feedback.

      Considering we only have the 3 environments, my initial thoughts were that we should first upgrade our QC environment for a week of regression testing. This way, we can deploy urgent hotfixes from DEV to Production.

      However, can you please confirm....during this time of regression testing on QC, can we still deploy from DEV to QC because DEV on on a lower version than QC?

      stefanhelzle0001
      stefanhelzle0001
      September 15, 2023

      That's the way! Confirmed!

        mikes0011
        mikes0011
        Brainy
        September 15, 2023

        I'm required to only use 3 environments - Dev, Test, Prod.

        When a new version goes GA, i immediately update TEST.  I'll let it simmer for a week (and more if there's an apparent issue).  Once I'm satisfied, I schedule updates for PROD and DEV at the same time (on a sunday evening).  During this time we deploy items directly from Dev to PROD.

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