above the basics no. there is not a really a magic bullet that can be applied to every environment. It unfortunatley requires you to undertand your environment and then customize it based on that. For example I would not use the same Test cases on anyone of my instances as they all serve different applications and functionality. On one instance it is enough to have the developers connect and app and say it worked. others we have to go through a full blown user test an show performance thresholds and the whole ball of wax. Follow the basics and go from there. If you are looking to implement to stadardized process you can treat this as a software change which it really is and follow the software change life cycle. Here is a good example of the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing_life_cycle