There are many potential reasons why an organization undergoing a concentrated effort to test their system prior to an upgrade may not be able to identify every issue that could arise in the production environment and significantly impact their solution.
Some production issues may be traced back to software defects. Other production issues may be environmental, implementation-specific, or caused by problems with supporting technologies.
For the majority of customers, many of these single factors are not important. The problem arises when a series of conditions collide and the factors suddenly become vitally important. This complexity can prevent an organization from identifying an esoteric situation or series of conditions that may lead to a significant interruption following an upgrade. For this reason, all upgrades—whether IPUP or Synchronous—must be carefully tested.
In deployments where OnBase is a mission-critical application, suitable risk mitigation planning and activities must be part of the upgrade process.
For most organizations, attempting to exactly mirror a production environment may not be realistic. When you realize the complexity of a production workload and other performance metrics occurring in a production environment, it becomes apparent that the best an organization can do is to match as many key factors between test and production as possible.