Deliver

deliver: shipping is a procedure, not an event

0. Entry conditions: all of them

• verify passed on everything in this release (evidence in STATE.md, not memory).
• code-review clean on everything in this release (blockers and majors resolved), or its trivial-tier skip recorded in STATE.md (verify §4 routes this).
• scope-guard clean; specs in this release at status done.
• CI green on the exact commit being shipped. Local green is not CI green. No CI yet (no remote/host)? Wire it now. First delivery is the moment. Genuinely impossible? Run the full gate chain on a fresh clean checkout and record that explicit exception in STATE.md. On GitHub, a first release also protects main: the owner applies the runbook docs/operations/branch-protection.md with repo admin.
• On a platform stack (the stack file's header declares a hosted platform): the target instance and the repo still agree. Export the environment fresh and compare it against what is committed; whatever was changed directly in the platform editor since the last export is brought into the repo or deliberately dropped, and either way it happens before the release, not during it. A repo that is behind its own instance ships a release that overwrites work nobody reviewed. This is the platform's standard failure mode and the one CI cannot see: green on the commit says nothing about what the instance holds.
• The product holds persistent data → docs/operations/backup-restore.md exists and the restore has been performed once, for real. An untested restore is a hope, not a backup.
• Compliance register (docs/compliance/REGISTER.md) has no open blocking item. For a first release or new data/AI processing, run comply first. A first release also proves the root SECURITY.md holds: the reporting channel works (on GitHub: private vulnerability reporting enabled in the repo settings), and once the product is placed on the market its support period is published (comply fills the marked fields).

1. The release

1. Version it: semantic version derived from Conventional Commits (breaking → major, feat → minor, fix → patch). Tag: vX.Y.Z.
2. Changelog: CHANGELOG.md at the root, newest version first. Generate from commits since the last tag, then edit for a human reader: what changed for the user, in the product's voice. Write the entry in the release commit and set its date when the tag is cut, so a dateless heading is the visible sign that a release is prepared but not out.
3. Deploy only via the runbook docs/operations/deploy.md. First delivery? Write that runbook now (target, credentials location (never in the repo), steps, verification URL, rollback procedure) and test it by following it literally, from a clean state.
4. Post-deploy verification: the runbook's smoke checks against the real environment: the critical flows, not a browse-around. Record results.
5. Rollback is part of delivery: before shipping, know the one command/procedure that undoes this release, and that it works.

2. Milestone handover

Deliverable milestone for a client/owner → run handover so the repo is cold-start complete, and demo against BRIEF's success criteria: per SC-item in this milestone, show it working.

A demo proves capability, not value: it works, and nobody has measured yet whether the promised value arrived. So before the milestone closes, every shipped SC-item's measurement plan in BRIEF carries a concrete read date ("quarterly" gets a date) and a named reader, set with the owner because the measurement is theirs, and maintain's loop reads it when that date passes. An SC-item BRIEF marks n/a has nothing to schedule; a quantified criterion with no plan at all is a scope question, not a delivery blocker.

3. Record

STATE.md: phase (maintain after first production release), release line (version, date, sha, environment), Now ▶. Deferred-but-shipped debt: DEBT.md rows checked against what shipped. New operational facts (URLs, dashboards, schedules) → docs/operations/, listed in the manifest. What this release cycle taught, a missing runbook step included, routes to INTAKE.md as a candidate like any session lesson (checkpoint, step 3 of its method, owns that rule). Report: version, where it now runs, evidence of the smoke checks, one next step. ⚓