2.3 Maintenance Testing

Question 1

What can trigger maintenance and maintenance testing?

Answer 1

• Modifications such as planned enhancements, corrective changes, or hot fixes.
• Upgrades or migrations of the operational environment.
• Retirement of a system or application.

Question 2

What does the scope of maintenance testing depend on?

Answer 2

• degree of risk of the change
• size of the change
• size of existing system

Question 3

What testing may be needed for an upgrade or migration of the operational environment?

Answer 3

• testing the new environment and changed software
• tests of data conversion/migration between the environments

Question 4

What tests may be needed when retiring a system or application?

Answer 4

• tests of data archiving solutions if long data-retention is required
• testing of restore and retrieval procedures after archiving data

Question 5

Testing the changes to a system in production includes what two parts?

Answer 5

Evaluating the success of the implementation of the change and the checking for possible regressions in parts of the system that remain unchanged.

Question 6

Is maintenance testing always planned in advance?

Answer 6

No, maintenance can involve planned releases/deployments and unplanned releases/deployments (hot fixes). Impact analysis may be done before a change is made, to help decide if the change should be made, based on the potential consequences in other areas of the system. Testing must meet these needs.