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Upgrade UAT Recommendations

Upgrade UAT Recommendations

Owned by Billy O'Shaughnessy
Last updated: Apr 02, 2025
3 min read

Overview

This page provides general recommendations for testing your LearningBuilder UAT instance. All clients will be provided with a Risk Assessment document ahead of your upgrade. The Risk Assessment is a customized document that helps you understand what customizations are in your LearningBuilder system that may be affected by the upgrade. This will help you formulate a test plan for your system, or you can choose to contract with Heuristics to have an assisted test plan created.

Please keep in mind that the Heuristics QA team thoroughly tests all “First-Class” features for every release, so you can be confident that the majority of your system has been tested already. Customizations, such as integrations and stored procedures, are not tested internally.

Principles of Testing

All testing for your upgrade should take place in your UAT environment, which will be upgraded several weeks ahead of your production environment.

As you explore the system, you may encounter any number of issues that raise questions. We are eager to hear your observations and will do our best to address your questions. As you approach testing, there are a few principles to follow:

  • If you observe something that looks different, it may not represent a defect in the upgrade. Please make note of your observation, but do not immediately come to the conclusion that the system is “broken.” It may be, so please let us know, but be prepared that the behavior or display you see may be an intentional choice.

  • If you observe something that looks different, do not automatically assume that the change was intentional. LearningBuilder is a complicated system and while we do our best to understand all the implications of an upgrade, we are human. Reporting to us a difference, even if it seems harmless, may help us uncover a deeper problem in the system. Your feedback can make a huge difference to us and to the rest of the LearningBuilder community.

  • If you see something that doesn’t look right in the UAT environment, before reporting the issue as related to the upgrade, please check against your Production environment. We find that many of our customers, upon scrutinizing their configuration, find existing gaps or adjustments they would like to make that are unrelated to the upgrade itself. We urge you to log these items but differentiate them from upgrade-specific issues. We will request that we postpone any configuration changes until after the upgrade is complete, to keep the upgrade process as free of complexity as possible.

Common Testing Recommendations

Every LearningBuilder site contains different configuration and customizations, but always recommend you test the following items (if applicable) in UAT prior to signing off on a production upgrade:

  • Enter at least one copy of all applications through submission and approval;

  • Review public directory results;

  • Run copies of all commonly used reports;

  • Print Queue (if applicable);

  • Data Import or Attendance Upload

  • Integrations. Please note, not all integrations can be accurately tested due to limitations with third party environments.

Information to Include When Reporting an Issue

In order to assist you in determining the cause of an issue, please include the following information in your item:

  • Confirm the environment in which you see the issue;

  • Confirm that you have checked against the Production environment and notice a difference between the two;

  • Provide a description of the Role you were using (for instance, “I was logged in as an Applicant);

  • Provide the member details, when available (for instance, “I was accessing Juan Alexander’s record, e-mail address xxx@xx.com, ID: 85956);

  • Include the area or page within the system where you observed the issue (for instance, “I was on the Eligibility Queue” or “I was viewing the person’s Member Details page”);

  •  Include the specific workflow(s) you were using (for instance, “I loaded the Continuing Education Activity”);

  • Then describe your observations; and finally

  • Include a screen capture if the observation can be illustrated visually, and try not to crop out important details such as the Learning Plan name or the applicant’s name.