Testing a fleet management software upgrade is extremely important – loss of data or productivity due to a failed upgrade can be very costly for a fleet organization. Users, managers, and IT are often hesitant to proceed with an upgrade due to the potential issues that an upgrade could cause for the organization. However, upgrading your test instance and then following a proper testing process can alleviate much of the stress of an upgrade. These four reasons to test when upgrading highlight important ways that you can control issues that arise after an upgrade and mitigate the risk of lost data or productivity for your organization.
Perfect Upgrade Process
An enterprise application upgrade process can be long and complicated, even despite your best efforts to effectively document the process. The upgrades can be confusing and difficult to follow, especially if it’s your fleet’s first upgrade. Upgrading your application in the test environment first allows you to walk through the process and become familiar with it, all while perfecting the steps and asking the manufacturer questions on unclear steps or errors encountered along the way.
Bugs
Although manufacturers do their best to QA (or Quality Assurance test) products before release, no release is going to be bug-free. If you test the upgrade in your test environment before moving forward in a true production scenario, you will have the opportunity to report any showstopper bugs to the developers of the application and get bugs fixed before your production upgrade.
Workflow Changes
Upgrades to enterprise applications often cause changes in essential workflows due to new features being added or old features becoming deprecated. Testing your fleet management software upgrade in the test environment allows you to analyze the changes to workflows and prepare your team and workflow processes for the new version of the workflow before releasing the updated version to your end users.
Documentation of your Fleet Management Software Upgrade
Many organizations struggle with documentation for their enterprise applications despite efforts to improve the process. During the testing of an upgrade, you have a great opportunity to update your documentation. As you are going through the workflows and testing processes, you can easily see outdated or incorrect documentation and correct it. This puts your team at an advantage for filling out important paperwork in the future. We all know what it feels like to get held up because of a small error or inconsistency in documentation!
AssetWorks prides itself on offering extensive testing environments for new and existing customers alike. Just like how it was described above, these environments give you robust control over, and experimentation with, the new features and changes present in the software. This puts your organization in a position to succeed in fleet management.
