Microsoft Word Hardware Reconfiguration Methodology V final2

Impact assessment

For every set of changes made to the system an impact assessment should be conducted; however, the implementation of an impact assessment should be commensurate with the amount time necessary to actually perform one as well as the time required to make the changes. For example, if several very small changes are made and the consequence(s) of these changes are already well known ahead of time then it may not be necessary to carryout an impact assessment. Judgement and common sense should be utilized at all times; otherwise, the impact assessment portion of testing could become excessively complex and cumbersome.

Before conducting any impact assessment two questions should be asked. The first is “will the system(s) and network(s) continue to behave as they always have after the changes are made?” The second question applies more specifically to system behaviour and is “if a set of changes makes no visible changes to the system or the users’ ability to interact with it then it is worth performing an impact assessment?”

Impact assessment-related issues are important to determine. Unfortunately, not all changes and their impacts can be known or understood ahead of time; however, many are known as they are already well documented and may even have been previously tested at a different time or place. Nevertheless, impact assessment should be conducted from within a laboratory-based environment. In addition, this laboratory is critical in order to adequately perform and test patches, updates, upgrades, manual system maintenance and bug fixes in order to look for potential incompatibilities, incoherencies, or new instabilities that could be introduced into the operational environment or infrastructure. These issues can be caused by changing and/or replacing key operating system libraries and interdependencies, applications, system and application configurations as well as configurations. Furthermore, it is important to determine if any of the changes break or modify system and organizational security policies. Impact assessment testing should be used in conjunction with benchmarking and system administrator and user-based testing.

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