One manual way to test release upgrades is to put the dist_upgrader tarball, from the package build, on a system you want to upgrade. Then you can extract the tarball which will contain a file named after the release to which you are upgrading and run that file with the appropriate arguments e.g.
./artful --frontend DistUpgradeViewText
That's just from memory though so I may be slightly wrong.
One manual way to test release upgrades is to put the dist_upgrader tarball, from the package build, on a system you want to upgrade. Then you can extract the tarball which will contain a file named after the release to which you are upgrading and run that file with the appropriate arguments e.g.
./artful --frontend DistUpgradeViewText
That's just from memory though so I may be slightly wrong.