Beta testing provides you with an early insight into releases. It also enables you to have your say in helping shape the products you use. We do this by letting existing users trial new features/releases whilst feeding back to us any findings. This experience benefits both Jadu and you as the user, as you get the chance to tell us what you think the pros and cons of the latest updates are.
How are beta tests set up on our (customer) system?
In order to take advantage of beta releases, you should have an existing environment available (or be able to set one up), this ensures there isn’t any business impact should any issues be found during the beta test period. We recommend that you use a DEV or Local environment where possible.
Can we preview the beta version of a release on a Jadu server first?
In relation to the XFP 7.0 beta, when it is available we will update one of our Sandbox environments for those customers without an internal DEV environment to be able to see the changes that have been made to the software’s user interface. You will only be able to access the Control Centre, however, and it will not give you the relevant file system access that would be required to test any of your own customisations / local developments that you might have on your own environments.
One of the main advantages of beta testing beta in advance of the full release is to test the compatibility of any of your own bespoke developments with the updated frameworks that are included within this release.
If a beta release is deployed to our UAT or live server, are we able to roll back, for example if there are bugs and issues?
The beta test would not be deployed to your live server. Only a final release should go into production (live to site) once these are made available. As mentioned before, we recommend that a non-critical DEV or Local environment is used to test the beta release.
As part of the beta test, as with any patch, you'll be able to do this via the Deployer user interface should you be using your own environment for conducting the beta testing on.
Is there anything else we need to be aware of to help us decide whether beta testing is for us?
If you don’t have access to Deployer, we will need to grant you access to be able to apply the beta test by our team. Only members of staff with Jadu Support accounts can currently be set up to access Deployer.
Deployer use is currently limited to LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) architecture customers, and if you host yourselves internally then the server must be able to connect to the Deployer API directly (i.e. without going through a proxy). Note: All Jadu hosted customers would be LAMP and not utilise a proxy.
Once you opt-in, you will need an initial patch to the relevant environment to meet the minimum version for Deployer support so that the beta release can then be deployed to your environment. There are a few steps that our team will need to assist with on your client repository setup to make this happen, but all straightforward and quick activities.