Release readiness

Release Readiness

A working demo is not evidence of production readiness. Production readiness is proven through sustained operation, incident handling, cost predictability, and controlled evolution.

This skill enforces the production bar. It produces a go / no-go verdict with a signed checklist. No checklist = no go.

When to use

• Before deploying to staging or production
• Before handing a system to another team
• Before declaring a sprint or milestone complete
• When someone says "it works on my machine"

Procedure

1. Validate the definition of done — confirm that acceptance criteria from the spec are met. "Looks good" is not a criterion. Run the actual validation commands.

2. Check all quality gates pass:

   • make lint — style and static analysis clean
   • make typecheck — no type errors
   • make test — unit tests green
   • make e2e — end-to-end tests green (or equivalent for your stack)
   • No outstanding HIGH or CRITICAL findings from security scan

3. Name the failure modes — at minimum:

   • What happens if the service is unavailable?
   • What happens under unexpected load?
   • What happens if a dependency (external API, database, queue) is degraded?
   • What is the data-loss risk?

4. Confirm rollback exists and is tested — a rollback plan that has never been tested is not a rollback plan. If the rollback has not been exercised, flag it.

5. Estimate cost impact — LLM calls, storage writes, egress, third-party API calls. Any unbounded cost vector must be capped or accepted explicitly.

6. Confirm monitoring and alerting — what fires when this breaks? Who gets the alert? What is the on-call runbook?

7. Check data boundaries — does the release touch PII, regulated data, or cross a tenant boundary? If yes, confirm the appropriate controls are in place.

8. Sign off — record: who reviewed, what was checked, what was accepted as known risk, and the go/no-go verdict.

Outputs

• Signed release checklist (append to PR or release doc)
• Go / no-go verdict
• List of accepted known risks with named owners

Guardrails

• No go without a rollback plan. "We'll figure it out" is not a rollback.
• Green CI is necessary, not sufficient. CI validates happy paths. Release readiness validates failure modes.
• Cost estimates are not optional. An unbounded LLM call in a hot path is a production incident waiting to happen.
• Monitoring must exist before go-live, not after. "We'll add monitoring later" means the first incident is invisible.

Anti-rationalization table

Excuse	Counter
"CI is green, we're good to go"	CI checks known paths. Release readiness checks failure modes CI doesn't cover.
"We'll monitor it after launch"	The first failure will be invisible. Add monitoring before go-live.
"Rollback is just redeploy the previous version"	Untested. Run the rollback in staging first.
"Cost is fine, it's low traffic"	Low traffic + an LLM loop bug = runaway spend. Cap it.