I am working on an upgrade right now with a client and have a quick tip to share, that may save a little bit of time in testing, depending on how many company databases there are.

Common Time Wasters

One very common problem with upgrades that I've seen is specific to people who, shall we say, are less than organized. Before users know it, they've printed off reams of paper and reports to compare data or whatever the reason, and they all look the same!  Yes, they suddenly can't remember which report is from GP 2010 and which report is from GP 10, or whatever the situation.

Quick Tip

Before printing anything, rename the testing company, temporarily, to include a tagline - version, environment, or whatever will help in testing. For me, I renamed mine when I was printing data validation reports so the company name, when printing on the report headers, said "GP 10 Pre-Upgrade Test Company" for instance, as shown below.

An example of a report with a temporary company name with "GP10 Pre-Upgrade Company" on it.
An example of a report with a temporary company name.

Now, instead of hand-writing a notation on every report users print and what they just printed from - or worse, printing a pile of reports and forgetting - it's pre-printed on the report. Circle or highlight it and move on to other testing.

I hope this helps someone out there… it's a simple tip, but one that saves some time during testing.