I love this advice - just wish we had seen this one sooner 🙂

Last weekend our biggest deployment in 10 years (we were deploying a brand new enterprise billing system + full financial history migration) almost got derailed because.... we forgot to double check that the production version of SQL Server on a critical component of our architecture was at the same version as QA.  The update procedures just flat refused to compile, until we figured out that the production edition was still 2008R2, and the code required 2014+.  It didn't take too long to work around the issue once we understood what caused it, but we did spin a little...

I am grateful to report we did finish the job and the new system is stable at this point.