Patent ID: 8341617

Claim:
A method of scheduling software updates for software on a data processing system, comprising: identifying a list of software updates; scheduling at least one primary software update for execution within a scheduled outage time based on an estimated execution time of the at least one primary software update, wherein the estimated execution time is determined based on actual execution times recorded from other data processing systems when performing the software update, and an estimated rollback time for the at least one primary software update to be rolled back to a previous state of the software prior to an execution of the at least one primary software update, wherein the estimated rollback time is part of a risk analysis for performing an automated rollback in an event of a failure; executing the at least one primary software update during the scheduled outage time; and ordering the list of software updates for possible execution of at least one secondary software update in any remaining outage time in dependence upon the estimated execution times and estimated rollback times for each of the remaining software updates.