Release Readiness
Philosophy
Last line of defense. Validate everything upstream first. Then harden minimally.
Final Defensive Coding
- •Only now add exception handling or defensive code — after exhausting upstream fixes
- •Keep it minimal — don't over-engineer
Business Metrics
- •Confirm whether business metrics are appropriate for this feature
- •User actions, conversions, feature usage, domain KPIs
Release Strategy
- •Ask: feature flag for gradual rollout?
- •Ask: A/B experiment needed?
- •Document rollback plan: feature flag off, revert deploy, data considerations
Dashboards
- •Remind to create/update dashboards
- •Print summary of available data to connect:
- •Logs, traces, metrics endpoints
- •Business events
- •Health checks
Environment Parity
- •Confirm staging matches prod: env vars, feature flags, data shape
Database Migrations
- •Confirm migrations are reversible
- •Test rollback
- •Check for locking issues on large tables
Load Testing
- •For high-traffic features, run load tests
- •Confirm rate limits and scaling behave as expected
Runbook
- •Update on-call runbook if feature introduces new failure modes
Quality Tools — IDE
Confirm running in IDE or run manually:
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Error Lens | Inline error display |
| WebHint | Browser best practices |
| ESLint | JS/TS linting |
| typescript-eslint | TS-specific rules |
| Stylelint | CSS linting |
| eslint-plugin-react-hooks | Hooks rules |
| eslint-plugin-jest | Jest rules |
| axe Linter | A11y linting |
| SonarLint | Code quality |
| Code Spell Checker | Typos |
| SQLFluff | SQL linting |
| Prettier | Formatting |
Quality Scans — Pipeline
Run or confirm in pipeline:
| Scan | Command |
|---|---|
| Type check | tsc --noEmit |
| Unused deps | depcheck |
| Dep vulnerabilities | npm audit / pip-audit |
| Code quality | SonarQube |
| Copy-paste detection | npx jscpd <path> |
| License compliance | license-checker / pip-licenses |
Flag copyleft licenses in proprietary code.
Bundle Analysis
- •Check bundle size:
webpack-bundle-analyzer,source-map-explorer - •Flag unexpected growth
Manual Checks
Remind to run:
- •Smoke test in staging — before prod
- •Lighthouse — performance, a11y, SEO, best practices
- •WAVE — a11y audit
- •Performance profiling — browser devtools, backend profiling as needed