You should know the importance of upgrading to the latest version of Magento Commerce to get the most value out of the platform and maintain a secure store. Keeping your Magento Commerce environment up to date is key to meeting your business needs. However, those upgrades take planning and investment from your team, so many customers are looking for ways to streamline this effort. That’s why Magento announced a new Upgrade Compatibility Tool for a more transparent, predictable, and seamless upgrade process.
Upgrade Compatibility Tool
Software updates are often deferred to avoid immediate costs; however, over time this leads to an accumulation of technical debt along with increased security risk. The Upgrade Compatibility Tool enables merchants to proactively identify incompatible customizations before a Magento Commerce upgrade, making the process more predictable and lowering the cost of performing regular upgrades.
The Upgrade Compatibility Tool is a Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool that analyzes customizations on a given Magento Commerce instance and identifies code that might need to be updated prior to an upgrade. In its Alpha release, the Upgrade Compatibility Tool can validate Magento PHP APIs and the GraphQL schema to identify potential issues that need to be resolved prior to upgrading, with additional upgrade coverage planned for future releases. While the goal of the Upgrade Compatibility Tool is to make the upgrade process more seamless, it does not reduce the need for regression testing.
Availability & Usage
An Alpha version of the Upgrade Compatibility Tool is currently available and is distributed as a Composer package that you can download from the Magento Repository. The tool is available for any Magento Commerce customer upgrading from version 2.x to 2.3 and later versions. A new version of the Upgrade Compatibility Tool will be released for each new Magento Commerce version. Once downloaded, you can run the tool against an installed Magento Commerce instance to check the compatibility of customizations with a target Magento Commerce version. Compatibility checks are currently limited in scope to PHP APIs and GraphQL schema as mentioned before.
For more information on the Upgrade Compatibility Tool and detailed instructions, see the Magento Commerce developer documentation.