Thanks on the patch dates! duh!
The last two years, the final version hit dev in early December, and test in mid-January. Even with holidays, we had 3-4 weeks to perform upgrade related validation prep.
Though these are bug fixes, the problem from a validation perspective is we don't know if the changes broke something or made the steps of a test slightly different. Discovering something like this once we get into the Test environment can be pretty catestrophic to the timeline, so we need to ensure we dry-run test everything on the final version of the release in the Dev environment before we touch Test.
This can be even further complicated by installation scripts (IQ's), as they may be more difficult to execute more than once, so we generally need to wait until the final release before we attempt them (which means we can't write test scripts if the config hasn't been applied).
