Deployment to live should be similar to test deployment, using your final set of configuration files. These can be transferred from one system to another. Remeber to change database connections if your live database is different to you test one. It is a good plan to retain a test system for continued testing.
As you deploy, follow each step that you used in your test environment build, testing as you go to make sure no steps are missed out.
If you wish to conduct exhaustive tests on you grouper installation you can run the complete test suite. To do this you need to start with an empty database, correctly configured in grouper.hibernate.properties, and a default sources.xml file. You should also set true in all junit test includes in grouper.properties. Next, open a command line and go to GROUPER_HOME/bin and run ./gsh.sh -test -all (linux) or gsh.bat -test -all (windows). The tests take some time to complete, but all should pass OK.