Release Readiness Checklist

Release readiness checklist

A release that is not ready is a release that does not ship. Use this checklist to make that call explicit instead of vibes-based.

When to run

• Any tagged release.
• Any deploy that touches paid traffic, customer data, or authentication.
• Any deploy where the rollback is non-trivial (DB migration, third-party config change).

The checklist

Each item is pass / fail / n/a. Any fail blocks the release.

Code

• All PRs in the release are reviewed and approved.
• CI green on the release commit (agent-ops-cicd-github).
• No TODO / FIXME comments introduced in customer-facing paths.

Observability

• Dashboards exist for the new code paths.
• Alerts exist for the failure modes you can predict.
• A baseline of the key SLIs has been captured in the 15 minutes pre-release.

Rollback

• A rollback plan exists (rollback-runbook).
• If the change has a DB migration, the migration is backwards compatible OR there is a documented forward-only plan with timing.
• The rollback has been mentally simulated by at least one human + one agent.

Comms

• Customers / internal users have been notified for visible changes.
• Support has a one-pager on what changed.
• On-call knows the release window.

Final gate

• One named human is the release owner during the deploy window.

Decision

Pass all items → ship. One or more fail → file a planning task per failure, postpone the release until they're green.

Anti-patterns

• Letting "we'll do that after the release" green-light an item.
• Skipping the rollback simulation because the change "is small".
• No named human owner — releases without an owner never get reverted in time.