Mission 08 · Build and prove

Review release readiness

Bind exact-build evidence, unresolved gaps, owners, rollout, rollback, and disable conditions to a human release decision.

Self-directed lesson

Field question: What evidence supports this exact release, what is missing, and what condition stops rollout?
Working artifact: Production readiness review
Effort: 90 minutes

You will learn

Why a passing demo, evaluation, or security review is only one input to release.
How exact versions, digests, migrations, capabilities, and evidence bind together.
How canary, rollback, disable, ownership, and incident readiness gate launch.

Field practice

Bind the candidate build to its data, configuration, model route, tools, evals, and migration state.
List evidence-backed gaps with owners and due dates.
Record launch, constrain, or hold with rollout and rollback conditions.

Before you begin

Bring the exact release candidate, migrations, configuration, data context, behavior bundle, capabilities, evaluations, rollback path, and named owners.

Learning objectives

Bind all evidence to one exact candidate and invalidate it when material dependencies change.
Separate product quality evidence from business, security, operational, and human authority.
Record launch, constrain, or hold with rollout, rollback, disable, and ownership conditions.

Core lesson

What you need to know

Review the exact build

A readiness review names the repository, commit, build digest, dependency lock, schema and migration versions, configuration, data context, model route, prompts or policies, tools, capability manifest, and evaluation revision. Evidence from a different combination may be informative but is not release evidence for this candidate.

Check that forward migration and rollback behavior are understood and exercised, old records replay safely, and rollbacks do not corrupt state. Verify secrets, tenant boundaries, upload and input constraints, operational telemetry, and support access for the actual deployment environment.

Use independent evidence lanes

Collect functional, evaluation, security, privacy, reliability, cost, accessibility, operating, adoption, and support evidence as applicable. A strong behavioral eval cannot waive a missing rollback path. A security review cannot prove customer acceptance. A model-generated status cannot close any gate.

List gaps with severity, owner, due date, minimum fix, evidence required, and promotion effect. Define what is non-waivable and who may accept residual risk. Preserve holds and failed attempts as part of the release chronology.

Control rollout and retreat

A launch decision includes cohort, canary limits, observability, stop conditions, rollback trigger, disable path, and accountable operator. Exercise the rollback or disable path; documentation alone is not evidence that it works.

Worked field case

Corrected candidate release review

Candidate rec-0.4.2 was held. The team must decide whether successor rec-0.4.3 has new, bound evidence for a constrained NorthLake pilot.

Evidence available

rec-0.4.3 is bound to configuration, NorthLake context, capability, evaluation, and security revisions distinct from rec-0.4.2.
Missing-note routing, adjudication, duplicate safety, readback recovery, rollback, and queued-work disable now pass for the successor candidate.
The Revenue Cycle VP accepts the recommendation-only NorthLake reframe, Product Security confirms the effect boundary, and the Platform Lead owns the canary release.

Reasoning path

Confirm scope is the NorthLake cohort and exclude unsupported payers.
Set canary volume, monitoring, cost ceiling, incident owner, and automatic stop conditions.
Record a constrained-launch decision; customer acceptance and production authority remain separate records.

Result

rec-0.4.3 may enter the bounded NorthLake pilot. No evidence or disposition from this review transfers to rec-0.4.2, Summit, or automatic submission.

Practice exercise

Run an exact-candidate gate

Review the release candidate from Missions 5–7 as if another team must operate it tomorrow.

Create the candidate binding and evidence registry.
Record gaps, owners, due dates, promotion effects, and non-waivable items.
Define cohort, canary, telemetry, stop, rollback, disable, and support conditions.
Exercise one rollback or disable path and capture the result.

Keep

A production readiness review with a defensible launch, constrain, or hold decision.

Review your work

Field rubric

Every evidence item binds to the candidate under review.
No evidence lane silently waives another.
Residual risk has a named accepting authority where permitted.
Rollback, disable, and ownership are exercised, not merely described.

Complete when

All non-waivable gates pass or the decision is hold.
The rollout and retreat paths have owners and observable triggers.
The decision does not imply customer acceptance or autonomous authority.

Check your understanding

Would changing one bound dependency invalidate the release evidence and trigger a rerun?

Working template

Download the mission artifact, complete it with source evidence, and review it against the rubric above.

Download Production readiness review template

Guided study and progress

Open this mission in the guided school to confirm the exercise and rubric, save completion in this browser, and resume the ten-mission path.

Open guided mission

Compare and go deeper

This lesson is self-contained. Compare your work with the calibrated answer, then use the attributed references when you need governed detail or additional implementation practice.

Annotated answer FDE Guide reference ↗Attributed technical depth ↗