Later this week both of our production systems will get upgraded from Desire2Learn 9.4.1 to 10.2. This will be an epic effort. Over several days a few dozen people will work on various aspect of the databases, application servers, and testing. Good ‘ole clean IT fun just in time for Christmas. Finding the magical gap between classes and end of term was hard enough when our upgrades took a day. These multi-day ones are much tougher.

Back at FUSION a coworker and I attended a presentation by the team lead for D2L’s Automation group. Thankfully the excellent work from there will be used as part of the upgrade to identify problems earlier. Also, our client testing appears to take a leap forward to automating testing. (We need to take a light year leap forward with application level monitoring.)

Six months of work will be complete.

Then we get to turn around and do it again for May.