Upgrade Best Practices?

Hello scot1967​ 

I don't know if I should stay in my lane or not, but my only Smartbear tool use is ReadyAPI and it looks like the discussion is based around TestComplete.  All of the above/below suggestions seem spot on.  I will just comment on my experience with ReadyAPI...

Since I/we (the team I work with) have never been bit by an upgrade bite (yet), when new versions are released, we upgrade.  Maybe just because we don't want to answer daily nag screen that annoys until upgraded :).   We have developed a simple batch file to invoke that loads our common libraries to the install location of new version and away we go.  Download to restart in working condition is about five minutes down time.  This is for our local usage... Only after a period of time (months) do we upgrade the CI/CD machine however (unless new feature usage is mandated).

We might have a different usage scenario for ReadyAPI also... We are highly dependent on the scripting capability within ReadyAPI which is a little more protected from change than the product itself.  Because of that usage of scripts, we use ReadyAPI not only for our bread and butter API testing, but also user interface testing of Web, Mobile and Windows Desktop applications via ReadyAPI integration with Playwright and Selenium, Appium and Winium.  That allows for no context switching to achieve a test case in any paradigm.