New Mendix releases - best practices

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We (as a small company with just 1 developer as of current) are running into the problem lately that new Mendix releases ''break things''. We are now working with mendix for about a year, and I'm used to just updating to the newest Mendix version (5.15.0 f.e.) as soon as it releases. When our projects were smaller I never ran into issues as the overview is generally quite good. However the last few times (as our project is growing larger) i'm running into (small) issues that, for example, some widgets are breaking down, some pages won't work as intended etc. Usually these things are very easy to fix, we however don't see them until our customers notice it which is obviously not a good thing. So we are wondering what the best practices are (easiest solution would be to just ''check everything'' ofcourse, but as we all know that isn't quite feasible in most cases). Is it even needed to allways update to the latest version? What is a good way to check if ''everything still works'' after a new version release Basicly, how do you, more experience mendix users, handle new mendix releases? As I'm realizing more and more that updating to the newest version isn't allways better.
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4 answers
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Hi Niels,

At Mansystems we have developed a testing framework to automate testing via the GUI, see here. This solution allows you to build test scripts alongside your developments and use these scripts whenever you like (in a release, but also when there are platform changes or even daily during developments to find bugs early).

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In general I ignore them unless

1) it contains something in specific reacton to an earlier ticket 2) it containts functionality/options I know will make the cleint(s) happy 3) it makes my live as a developer easier

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I try to keep up with new releases. First I perform an impact analysis to see what breaks and what API calls are deprecated. Then I decided what to do. When the new features or fixes are valuable then I plan time, otherwise I wait for the next one. And when I go for a new release, I often wait for the .1 version of it. When 5.x.0 is released I start the upgrade and the final upgrade is with version 5.x.1.

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We usually never update to a ..0 release, most of the time a ..1 variant will be released with some bugfixes.

Furthermore we also check if an upgrade is actually benificial for us, and if the client wishes to invest in this. I personally do keep up with them and try to do 'something' with each version to get a feel of the changes.

To see if everything still works, we usually just to that: We check if everything still works. It might be time consuming, but I always like to think you could run in to things you'd otherwise miss.

Still it's something you should have a good feel with, and the client as well ofcourse.

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