What a weekend.  Not necessarily in a good way.  We finished testing Maintenance Packs 6, 7 and bundles 16 and 17 on Friday and according to the project schedule we had this weekend to get it migrated to the other six PeopleSoft environments so it would be ready to go for User Acceptance Testing.  Since I originally applied the maintenance I was volunteered to migrate it everywhere.

I’m not crazy about applying maintenance this late into the project, but we found a critical issue a few weeks before beginning User Acceptance Testing that was fixed in Bundle #16.  Just to get us to that point required Maintenance Packs 6 and 7.  Then Oracle released Bundle #17 which fixed another important error, so we decided to throw it in.

So we put the maintenance into our Demo environment, and let the users make sure it fixed the problems they were interested in.  Once we had their blessing, we created a new environment from one of the environments that had converted data, configuration, and transactions.  Then we ran compare reports and applied the maintenance packs and bundles to this new one.

I tested what I could, but to really test you need people with knowledge of how the organization is using the functionality.  We had our functional team leads hit it for a few days to make sure the bugs were still fixed and the big major processes work.  Once we had that assurance, we scheduled this weekend’s work.

I always learn a lot when I go through one of these processes, and having been through it a few times I thought I’d share some of my observations.