Hi cobrien,
We only run software in production if it runs without any issues. We are deeply dependant on Orion and we therefore expect it to perform without trouble 24/7/365. This then requires in house testing to confirm that there are no issues which would cause downtime, wrong data or performance issues. We have 0 tolerance for software that doesn't deliver.
If there is a known issue and that issue can be addressed with a hotfix then that hotfix would be tested and confirmed to solve the issue as well. Applying a hotfix to a test setup for testing is rather straight forward and in best case scenario would take very little time to carry out. Applying a hotfix to a production system is a whole different story. Not only are we required to create change requests and change documentation but we are also required to test the change for at least a week before going live. 9 hotfixes would then require 9 change requests, 9 change docs, 9 testing procedures, 9 weeks of testing and then 2 more weeks to implement on a production system. You probably think that this is overkill and feel sorry for us, we do too but these are the guidelines we need to follow...
When it comes to deploying a version release, the procedure is similar to hotfix testing, only it takes much longer because bugs and issues are expected to be present in such a release. Only when a service pack is made available do we ever consider starting a test. Example; with NPM 11, we'll only consider testing it for production use once 11.1 or 11.x is released.
Again, we are not the only ones that have expectations to the software that we use. If it doesn't deliver then we won't be using it. Hope that explains the situation.