Testing Guidance
Each month, the team at Readiness analyses the latest Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance. This guidance is based on assessing a large application portfolio and a detailed analysis of the Microsoft patches and their potential impact on the Windows platforms and application installations.
For this May release cycle from Microsoft, we have grouped the critical updates and required testing efforts into functional area including:
Microsoft Office
- A change to how OLE handles web content will require a test scenario for embedding and loading external web content (text, images and video).
Microsoft .NET and Developer Tools
- Microsoft SQL server updates this month will require a test of new connections with different versions of SQL Server. Your line-of-business applications that rely on SQL server connections will require a full UAT before releasing this month’s developer update.
Windows
The following core Microsoft features have updated this month including:
- Windows Common Error log feature (CLDFLT.SYS) will require testing creating, reading, updating and deleting (CRUD) log files
- DNS updates will require testing for non-existing domains registered in each managed zone.
- Microsoft update to the Crypto library will require tests of new creation and deletion.
- Microsoft’s Routing and Remote Access Servers (RRAS) servers will require light testing for valid connections
- Smartcard access to Microsoft Windows desktops will require basic access testing.
Aside from updating several key features on the Windows desktop platform this month, Microsoft has also updated how the following API’s are handled:
- SetFileBandwidthReservation and GetFileBandwidthReservation
- The MMC and Windows Shell (MPRAPI.DLL)
- Microsoft’s CNG crypto implementation (NCRYPT.DLL)
These are tough updates to test properly as you will require a detailed list of what applications depend upon (and actually use) these updated API’s.
Automated testing will help with these scenarios (especially a testing platform that offers a “delta” or comparison between builds). However, for your line of business applications getting the application owner (doing UAT) to test and approve the testing results is still absolutely essential.
This month Microsoft has made a major (general) update to the Win32 and GDI subsystems with a recommendation to test out a significant portion of your application portfolio.
