Testing the IBM Business Process Manager upgrade

Before you upgrade your IBM® Business Process Manager production environment, consider running tests to find problems with the upgrade procedure, the environment data, or your application design that might prevent the upgrade from being successful.

About this task

Although the first option in the following procedure is usually enough, other testing methods can identify additional problems before they affect your production systems. If you have not upgraded for a while or had trouble with production upgrades, you might want to consider the other options when you are planning to upgrade.

Procedure

Upgrade the test Process Server environments first and test your existing applications.
When you are upgrading a set of environments that consist of a Process Center, a production Process Server, and one or more test Process Server environments, roll out the upgrades incrementally. See Performing a rolling upgrade. By upgrading the test Process Server environments first, you can validate the upgrade procedure and test that your existing applications still work well at the new level.
Limitations:
- This testing method does not detect problems that are related to environment-specific data. For example, corrupted IBM Installation Manager or database data that is only in your production system will not be noticed until you upgrade your production system.
- If you are upgrading from a previous release, you cannot test with updated system toolkits until you upgrade all your environments.
- If there are problems specific to Process Center, you will find them only after you upgrade all your environments.
Set up a temporary Process Center for testing.
If you can set up a temporary Process Center, you can test for problems with Process Center before you upgrade your production environment. If you are upgrading from a previous release, you can import your snapshots and test them with the updated system toolkits. After you complete your testing, discard the test Process Center and note the changes that you must make in your normal Process Center system after you finish the upgrade.
Test the upgrade by using production database data.
Some database-specific problems can be found only when the production data is used. You can use this test method to identify and correct problems that might exist in your production database without multiple outages.
Test the upgrade by using installation data from an existing installation.
This testing method checks for corruption in Installation Manager or IBM BPM installation data that might prevent a successful upgrade. You can use this method to identify and correct problems in your production installation data without requiring multiple outages.