Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

8.10. Production Support Testing

This final test category, production support testing, dovetails with the design and development process. You need to design solutions in a way that allows them to be supported in a "locked-down" production environment. A production environment should be significantly more restricted than the environment where a solution is developed and tested.

This section covers some of the more common issues and problems that you should consider when designing your solution. You should test that your solution can be managed and operated in a production environment as designed. This section does not provide an exhaustive checklist of things to test. Instead, it examines some of the more common scenarios of which you need to be aware. And this section reminds you to consider the production support scenarios applicable to your specific project and to test that those scenarios work as desired prior to taking your solution live.

8.10.1. Deploying New Solution Artifacts

For many scenarios, you might need to deploy new versions of solution artifacts without halting processing. The two most common artifacts that typically need to be versioned and that frequently cause the most pain are XSD schemas and orchestrations. Although the deployment of a new schema is a relatively trivial task, it is complicated when those schemas are associated with long-running business processes that are in flight and cannot easily be stopped.

Schema versions often have dependent artifacts ...