@Kevinjohn Gallagher -

My comment was just a quick one to point out that enterprise level companies have different point of view. Perhaps, I better put some context around my comment.

Although I have worked with large commercial companies, over the last 4 years I've been working in Government, so that's the main perspective I bring. My experience in govt has been that the ICT department (which I spent several years with) is similar to most enterprise level ICT departments, although a) they are even more conservative and b) ahem.. perhaps they aren't as well organised.

I've seen some things which are just silly. When I was running the web team, we had a case where we could not get small, non-critical CSS tweaks in the template onto the site without having to go through dev > test > prod. This despite the fact we'd tested it on our own local server. At least we didn't have to go through CAB (Change Advisory Board) for this level of change, but it still took a couple of days for the server team to push the change through to the live server. And when I say live server, it wasn't a public facing website, it was an internal facing one, with non-critical information, which know one knew about yet.

I defy anyone to argue that's sensible!

However, I'm not arguing that testing before upgrading isn't sensible. I've been quite vocal about that in the past, for example in my The Solution To The Lack Of WordPress Beta Testing post from last year, where I:

argue against the unthinking update immediately advice
state that there are not enough end users involved in beta testing
propose a staged rollout (such as Google uses for Google Analytics)

Admittedly I could have been far more confrontational in that post, but I don't think that's constructive.

Our department recently chose a new CMS and WordPress wan't even on the radar. I'm going to go into the reasons why WordPress doesn't have more traction in Government (at least in Australia) in my upcoming WordPress and Government talk. One of the reasons is this very testing issue. The recent discussions in the community about moving to a Chrome like 'auto upgrading in the background' feature is just not going to cut it with the enterprise.

Our websites have quite a bit of content that we are required by legislation to have. We don't lose millions of dollars if the site goes down, but there's always the potential for the government to come under criticism from the media and the opposition party. And if the Premier or a Minister is announcing something, the site had better be up!

So I am a fan of testing. However, the traditional enterprise level ICT approach (at least that I've seen) has been to put risk mitigation and process above delivering benefits to the business and to customers. That needs to be balanced and that's what I meant when I said:

Thankfully a lot of these companies are realising that they need to change, but that’s the traditional enterprise IT mindset.

I'm not actually saying they shouldn't bother testing. However, I do believe that they can look at ways of streamlining the process. A major version release may require a lot of testing. Security releases within a major release may require less testing, depending on what was changed (which you can look at in trac). If WordPress is being used for the main mission critical website, test more! If it's being used for a secondary less important website, maybe you don't need to test as much.

My original comment was obviously too brief to get my position across, so hopefully this has made my position clearer.

Oh and by the way, we still use IE6 here. IE7, we dream of IE7! :)

(actually people can request to upgrade to IE7 and I get a real browser because I'm in web).