Patent ID: 8918774

Claim:
A method of updating a computer system, comprising: storing on a support system available updates configured to apply a change to the computer system and one or more relevant rules corresponding to each change, wherein each of the one or more relevant rules contains a weight for each of environment information, error information, and usage characteristics and a specified threshold value; collecting data describing the usage characteristics on the computer system, wherein the usage characteristics include at least one of time spent in a code area of the computer system and amount of data processed; using a recommendation engine to analyze the data describing the usage characteristics and to recommend one or more changes based on evaluation of the one or more relevant rules and the analyzed collected usage characteristics data, including, at least in part, the time spent in a code area of the computer system used for comparing value added versus risk of adverse effect; evaluating the one or more rules for the one or more recommended changes to be used by a pattern matching technique, the pattern matching technique including at least one of: matching environment information of the computer system against environment information of the one or more changes, matching error information of the computer system against error information of the one or more changes, and matching usage characteristics of the computer system against usage characteristics of the one or more changes, wherein a match results in a numeric value, and for each match, multiplying the match by its associated weight to produce products and calculating a sum of the products such that if the sum of the products exceed the specified threshold value the corresponding change is added to a recommendation list corresponding to the computer system; and adding prerequisite changes corresponding to the one or more changes on the recommendation list to the recommendation list.