Practices for upgrades and modifications

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

The typical upgrade, update, or modification should follow this sequence:

  1. Experimentation and documentation: You experiment with the changes on the test environment until you are satisfied with the results. You document 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 correctly applied, and no regressions occur.
  3. Implementation: You follow the procedure to apply the changes to the production environment or notify an IT specialist to implement.

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

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

  • A test environment where system administrators make and test modifications, upgrades, or updates before migrating those changes to the production environment
  • An optional validation environment where you confirm the changes work as expected
  • A production environment where users work and interact with the system
Figure: Sample deployment with test and production environments
Example of a typical deployment

The test environment

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.

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.

The optional validation 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 by causing a regression. Not all deployments have such an environment.

The production environment

Once you test and approve the changes, you have one of two options:

  1. Hand it off to the IT department to validate the changes before applying them to the production environment
  2. Apply the changes to production, depending on if you are responsible for maintaining it