What to check before every platform update
Every platform vendor tests its own software before an update. None of them tests your configuration, your integrations or your security roles. That part is yours, and it comes round on every release.
Know your update calendar
Cadences differ. Some vendors give a preview window before changes reach production. For example, Workday opens a preview about five weeks before its March and September releases, while Oracle Fusion applies updates to a test environment first and leaves a window of roughly two weeks to check critical processes. ServiceNow upgrades skip records you have customized, and you must review them. Find out your platform's schedule and put every date on a shared calendar.
The checklist
- List your critical processes. Aim for 10 to 20 that must never break, such as order to cash, onboarding or incident handling.
- List your integrations. Note what each one sends and receives.
- List your security roles. Updates can change what a role allows, so test with real role types, not just an administrator.
- List your reports and dashboards. Leaders notice a broken report first.
- Test in a non-production copy first. Run the same steps before and after, and compare.
- Give each test an owner and a deadline. Business users usually do the testing, so tell them early.
- Record the results. A short log of what passed, what failed and what you changed makes the next update faster.
Review what the update changes
Read the release notes for features you can adopt and custom work you can replace with standard functions. Each customization you remove is one less item to test next time.
Why automate
Manual regression testing can take weeks, and teams often cannot finish it inside the preview window. Reusable test steps, even simple scripts, shorten the cycle every time.
Release readiness is one of the four accelerator types we build around. Tell us which platform you run, and we will share what we see most often.