The SQA2 Blog: General
A patch is a code change made under time pressure, and every code change can break something that worked before. In healthcare, a broken workflow can delay a clinic schedule, a lab result, or a medication order.
The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident shows how far a single change can travel. A flawed update to the company’s Falcon endpoint software crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows devices on July 19, 2024, and healthcare was among the hardest-hit sectors. The update was a content change to security software and not a patch for a disclosed vulnerability, yet it carries the same lesson. In CrowdStrike’s own root cause analysis, as quoted by ArcherPoint, a parameter count mismatch “evaded multiple layers of build validation and testing.” Twenty-one input fields were defined and twenty values were supplied. A test built around that exact combination is the kind of check that catches such an error.
Three questions need an answer after every fix. Is the original flaw closed? Did anything the fix touched stop working? Do the connected systems still behave? A patch program that answers only the first leaves the other two for production to answer.
Several methods keep the checks fast without making them shallow.
First, tier the regression work by clinical and business risk. Flows that handle patient data, orders, results, or billing get an automated regression run on every patch. Lower-risk areas get lighter checks that a Quality Engineer and the product owner agree on in advance.
Second, keep a smoke suite that finishes within minutes of every merge, so a broken build is found while the author still remembers the change.
Third, write a retest case for every fixed flaw and keep it in the permanent suite. A vulnerability closed this quarter should still be closed next year, and only an automated check can confirm that at a reasonable cost.
Fourth, test the odd combinations, such as missing fields, unusual values, and older data formats, because those are the cases that slip through.
Fifth, record what changed, which tests ran, and what the results were. Auditors, customers, and regulators ask for that trail later, and keeping it as the work happens is far easier than rebuilding it.
AI can speed up the drafting of test cases and the summary of results. AI accelerates execution, not judgment, so people still decide which risks matter and whether the evidence is enough.
At SQA², our Quality Engineers work inside the delivery team through Embedded QA plus Software Quality as a Service (SQaaS), so regression suites and retest cases are built alongside the fixes.
This is a part of our overall Health Tech Patch Smart series.
Sources: ArcherPoint, “The CrowdStrike Outage: What Happened and Lessons Learned”
