The following are (hopefully) the only regular changes to be aware of. Their application will (of course) follow the approach for staging changes, and are just a subset of possible configuration changes.
All of these updates could be automated.
Unfortunately, every year or two, it's necessary to update ST's knowledge of when holidays occur, in
/software/rt-math-1/lib/debug/st/config/holidays.pm
The information (at least in 2015) comes from uwaterloo.ca/human-resources/pay-administration/paid-holidays. Ideally it should be obtained automatically from campus open data. See ST #88838 for details.
Each year (or more), the time interval list(s) in the RunOn Sentence need to be updated with new terms/years. Each year, the oldest year and its term selections become a single selection for "since" that year, and the upcoming year is added. This is often done every term. It can be handy to have the next term in the list before the term starts.
The list is in the array named "intervals_past" in
/software/rt-math-1/doc/debug/workList/request.shtml
There is also a year on the second last line of the Sentence. It can change to the current year after annual reviews are done. That's done in the common_details_query() function.
WARNING: there are tables, used for the last two lines of the Sentence, which index into the interval list. Whenever the list changes, the indexes into it may have to change. The functions common_details_query() and views_recent() are relevant.