Microsoft Word Hardware Reconfiguration Methodology V final2

Incremental changes

It is important when testing systems in a laboratory that changes, wherever possible, be made incrementally. This is not always practical or possible, however, to put into practice. When testing various maintainer-provided updates and upgrades, depending on how they are to be implemented, incremental implementation may not be possible although with tweaking it often is. Certainly, this is easier to achieve when using manual system maintenance as compared to maintainer-based updates and upgrades as these generally require an installation program that does not always make it possible to make incrementally changes. However, most distributions provide the ability to fine tune system and application updating; upgrading on the other hand is often far more problematic. Nevertheless, this will vary considerably from distribution to distribution and from version to version. At the same time, configuration files can also be changed incrementally, making a set of changes and testing them before proceeding with another

set of changes. These changes can be small or large and consist of one or more configuration files.

Making changes incrementally is always a best practice; however, time does not often permit for this. After each modification (or set of) it is appropriate to perform benchmarking tests and comparisons. Incremental changes can allow for several goals can be attained:

1. 
   It enables a more precise targeting and tracking of problems, instabilities, and inconsistencies that arise because of changes and/or modifications.
   

2. 
   Facilitates the rolling back of changes, as there is less to be removed and undone as compared to a full system update or upgrade.
   

3. 
   It makes version and system change control easier to track and maintain.
   

Unfortunately, during this process, much will depend on the distribution itself as different operating systems use various approaches to applying updates and upgrades. In general, upgrades tend to make incremental testing difficult and sometimes for all practical purposes infeasible.

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