Summary

This article is intended to provide guidance for ASPIRE v5 customers to test a new release of the system prior to deployment for production use. The processes outlined are not representative of all potential configurations and usage of the system and do not constitute a warranty against issues occurring following the upgrade of a production instance to a later version of the platform. Customers planning to adopt a later version of the system should use this information as a baseline to develop a strategy that includes their business processes, licensed modules, integrations and other processes specific to their use of ASPIRE v5.

Test Environment

All processes to be validated prior to a production upgrade should be tested in a non-production instance of ASPIRE v5. If a test environment is needed please reach out to LTi Account Management.

System Inventory

In preparing for a production upgrade testing effort it is recommended that customers review their current usage of the ASPIRE platform to accurately gather an inventory of users, business processes and other critical information to establish a testing methodology. Examples of information to collect are:

1. Users and roles – Active system users with respective permissions and business functions
   
2. Reports – Reports used for daily, weekly, monthly and annual reconciliation efforts
   
3. Business Cases – Sample transactions representative of common business
   
4. Integrations – System or non-standard processes that retrieve or provide data to a third party
   
5. Business Process Map – Visual representation of transactional ecosystem and business processes

Project Planning

It is recommended that a formal project plan with assigned resources and deliverables be developed prior to the commencement of testing efforts. An owner of the project plan to maintain it throughout the testing efforts with documented progress, representatives of functional business teams, representatives of technical teams and other critical business process owners should be considered stakeholders of the upgrade effort.

Planning Template

A sample template for documenting a project methodology is attached to this article and can be used as a baseline for constructing an approach that incorporates specific business processes into the validation of a later release of ASPIRE v5 prior to a production upgrade.