Release Readiness Reviewer
Review whether a specific release is ready to ship by checking scope, tests, compatibility, migrations, configuration, observability, rollout, rollback, support, security, and ownership against explicit evidence. Use before a production deployment, major version, risky feature launch, migration, or go/no-go meeting.
npx agentscamp add skills/release-readiness-reviewerInstall to ~/.claude/skills/release-readiness-reviewer/SKILL.md
Produces an evidence-backed go, conditional-go, or no-go recommendation for one release. It checks changed behavior, required tests, compatibility, migrations, flags, configuration, security, observability, progressive delivery, rollback feasibility, communications, and accountable owners without treating a green CI badge as complete readiness.
Judge one release from current evidence and name what remains unresolved.
Workflow
- Establish release identity. Record artifact or commit, environment, intended time, included changes, excluded work, owners, risk class, and user impact. Reject a moving or ambiguous scope.
- Review change evidence. Inspect diffs, tests, dependency and configuration changes, generated artifacts, feature flags, operational tasks, and known issues. Link every readiness claim to a source.
- Check compatibility. Verify API, schema, event, SDK, client, runtime, and infrastructure compatibility across mixed versions and deploy order. Identify mandatory coordination.
- Assess data and configuration. Review migrations, backfills, secrets, environment variables, defaults, capacity, region differences, and one-way transformations. Confirm target values without exposing credentials.
- Evaluate verification. Require relevant automated and manual results, unresolved failures, representative environments, performance or load evidence where risk warrants, and post-deploy smoke tests.
- Confirm observability and support. Name dashboards, alerts, logs, traces, business signals, on-call owner, escalation, status communication, customer support notes, and known symptom recognition.
- Review rollout and recovery. Check stages, cohorts, bake times, promotion gates, abort thresholds, rollback mechanism, data compatibility, recovery time, and fallback when rollback is impossible.
- Issue the decision. Choose go, conditional go, or no-go. List blockers separately from accepted risks, conditions, owners, deadlines, approval authority, and evidence that will close each item.
WARNING
Do not turn unknowns into implicit acceptance. An unverified migration, missing owner, or untested rollback remains visible in the decision.
Output
Return release identity, risk summary, evidence matrix, blockers, accepted risks, rollout and rollback readiness, observability and support readiness, decision, approvers, and time-bounded conditions. Include the exact post-deploy verification and abort signals.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between release readiness and a release checklist?
- A checklist names required areas; a readiness review resolves each item against evidence for the specific release, exposes unknowns and blockers, and assigns a go/no-go recommendation with owners.
- Can a release be ready if rollback is impossible?
- Sometimes, but only with explicit recognition of the irreversible change, stronger rehearsal and rollout controls, a forward-recovery plan, narrower exposure, and accountable approval.
Related
- 9 Best Claude Skills for Release ManagementUse Claude skills for readiness reviews, canaries, rollbacks, API deprecations, migrations, versioning, changelogs, and release notes.
- Canary Release PlannerDesign a canary / progressive rollout so a bad release reaches 1% of users instead of 100% — staged traffic with bake times, gating metrics compared against the concurrently-running stable baseline, and automated promote-or-rollback. Use when shipping a risky change, when you want automatic rollback on regression, or when moving off all-at-once deploys.
- Dependency AuditAudit project dependencies for known vulnerabilities and turn the raw scanner output into a triaged, prioritized upgrade plan. Use when an audit is noisy, a CVE was reported, or you need to know which advisories actually matter.
- Migration WriterWrite a safe, reversible, zero-downtime database migration using expand-contract — add the new shape, backfill in batches, switch reads/writes, then drop the old — so every deploy stays compatible with the running app version. Use when adding or changing schema on a live system, renaming/dropping a column, adding NOT NULL or a foreign key on a large table, or when a migration risks locks, table rewrites, or an unrevertable step.
- Rollback Plan WriterWrite a tested rollback and forward-recovery plan for a release, including triggers, commands, compatibility constraints, data handling, verification, ownership, and stop conditions. Use before high-risk deploys, schema or configuration changes, dependency upgrades, model or provider migrations, feature launches, and any release where 'just redeploy the old version' is incomplete or unsafe.
- Changelog From PRsDraft a release changelog by summarizing merged pull requests since the last tag. Use when preparing a release or writing release notes.