Release Checklist

Works alongside: QA Checklist · Security Checklist · Incident Report

The template

Instruction lines are marked with > — delete them once the document is filled in.

Release: _______________ Date / window: _______________ Release manager: _______________ Go/no-go decision-maker: _______________

1. Before the day#

• [ ] Scope frozen; what is in this release is written down
• [ ] QA checklist complete and signed
• [ ] Security checklist complete and signed
• [ ] Change approved through whatever governance applies
• [ ] Stakeholders told what is changing and when
• [ ] Support team briefed on new behaviour and known issues
• [ ] Documentation and release notes updated
• [ ] Dependencies confirmed ready (other teams, vendors, data)

2. Rollback — decided before you need it#

• [ ] Rollback procedure written, step by step
• [ ] Rollback tested, not assumed
• [ ] Backup taken immediately before release, and its restore verified
• [ ] Database changes are reversible, or a forward-fix is prepared
• [ ] Point of no return identified: after step ___, rollback is no longer possible
• [ ] Rollback decision-maker named: _______________

The most common cause of a long outage is discovering during the incident that the rollback does not work.

3. Go / no-go#

Decision: GO / NO-GO By: _______________ Time: _______________

4. Deployment#

• [ ] Announce start
• [ ] Maintenance page enabled, if applicable
• [ ] Backup confirmed complete
• [ ] Deploy
• [ ] Configuration and secrets verified in the target environment
• [ ] Database migrations run and verified
• [ ] Caches invalidated where needed
• [ ] Maintenance page removed

5. Verification — before declaring success#

• [ ] Smoke test of critical paths passes
• [ ] Authentication works, including a fresh login
• [ ] A real transaction completes end to end
• [ ] Integrations responding
• [ ] Error rates normal
• [ ] Response times normal
• [ ] Logs show nothing unexpected
• [ ] Scheduled jobs still running
• [ ] Customer data intact — verified by count or checksum, not by assumption

"The site loads" is not verification. Verify the thing the business depends on.

6. After#

• [ ] Announce completion
• [ ] Monitor for an agreed period: ___ hours
• [ ] Release notes published
• [ ] Version tagged in source control
• [ ] Changelog updated
• [ ] Previous version retained for rollback until: _______________
• [ ] Retrospective scheduled if anything went wrong

7. If it goes wrong#

Symptoms that trigger rollback:

Who decides: _______________ How long we try to fix forward before rolling back: ___ minutes

Record#