What functionality should I test before upgrading Jama Connect®?

Author: Amanda Jennewein

Date: July 2024

Audience: Jama Software® Administrators 

Products Applicable: Jama Connect®

Use Case

What functionality should I test before upgrading Jama Connect®?

Best Practice

While we do our best to make the upgrade process as smooth and straightforward as possible, new versions of Jama Software® will include new features and improvements that may change how certain parts of the software work. This is particularly true if your current production version is more than one version behind your target version. Jama Software® recommends running the upgrade process on a test environment before applying any upgrade to your production server. This will ensure that any changes will not negatively impact your organization's configuration and functionality.

Implementation

• Create some dummy data. Please follow your regular process and test the areas of the application that your organization uses most. If your users spend a lot of time in the Review Center, create some reviews and revisions, comment on them, approve them, and close them. If you use the collaboration stream, comment on an item, flag questions, and answers, and use filters to find old comments. Any changes to Jama Software's functionality that may impact your work process will be identified here.
• Test new features. If you plan to use any new features that Jama Software® has introduced since your last update, we recommend configuring them to reflect how you will use them in production. It's essential to go through your standard workflow with the new features enabled. We are excited about our latest features and want you to make the most of them. However, some of our new tools are designed to address complex product delivery challenges and may require specific best practices to be developed based on how you use Jama Software®. It's essential to thoroughly review and ensure a clear understanding of these practices before making them available to a broader user base.
• Get information into and out of Jama Software. Remember to try importing and exporting using different methods. Sometimes, you might encounter issues, like images needing to display correctly in Word exports. These problems usually stem from configuration issues resulting from updating one or more components with Jama.
• Test custom reports. Because these reports rely on low-level internal data structures used in the product's development, Jama Software® cannot guarantee that the calls and resources used in these reports will remain consistent across different versions. We will try to highlight any significant changes in the release notes. However, if you depend on any custom reports for your work, it is essential to test them thoroughly to ensure that there have been no breaking changes.
• Test Jama Software integrations. Before you upgrade your production instance of Jama Software®, it's essential to test the integration if you regularly sync Jama Software® items with other applications. Whether you use Jama Software® Integration Hub or Jama Software's legacy connectors to integrate with other applications, it's best to test the integration with one or two sets of items first in a test environment. Make sure to sync items in the test instance of Jama Software® against a test environment of the connected application. For example, if you sync with JIRA and have a JIRA test instance, create one project mapping similar to what you have in your Jama Software production and test the Jama-JIRA sync.
• Test custom API integrations. We will not change API calls without warning. However, new features can sometimes affect how those calls work and their return data. For instance, in Jama Software 2014.1, we introduced relationship rules, which added new restrictions to how items could relate to each other. This impacted the SOAP API's relateItems(...) call. It is essential to review any custom integrations to understand how new features might affect their operation. Test them against the latest version to ensure they work as expected.

References

• Supported Software & System Requirements
• System Administrator Resources

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