Recommended practices for upgrades or changes

When you upgrade or make changes to IXIA CCMS, test them in a non-production environment.

Since each deployment is different, test the changes on a separate test environment not used for production. The purpose of first making changes in a test environment is to identify what you need to adapt the general instructions provided by MadCap Software 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.

Note: Such an approach is standard practice in IT and serves to reduce impacts to your users in the production environment.

Each modification, upgrade, or update should follow a process similar to this:

  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 confirm the procedure is correct, the changes are applied correctly, and no regressions occur. In some instances, you submit documentation of your activity to the IT department and obtain approval for the changes before you can implement them.
  3. Implement: In some deployments, the IT department is responsible for running the procedure again in the test environment before applying the changes to the production environment. In other deployments, you are responsible for implementing the changes yourself.

Example testing workflow

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

  1. A test environment you use for testing modifications, upgrades, or updates before pushing to the production environment
  2. (Optional) A validation environment you use to test your changes on a copy of your production environment to verify and confirm that the instructions are complete and correct, the changes are applied successfully in the environment, and that you have not broken something or caused a regression as a result of your changes
  3. A production environment current users use for active work
Figure: Example of a typical deployment
Example of a typical deployment