ICS 121: Release Checklists
Overview
- What are release checklists?
- Why use release checklists?
- Example of a release checklist
What are release checklists?
- Release checklists are documents that help the team to produce
a release without skipping key steps or ignoring the concerns of
key stakeholders
- You can think of a release checklist as count-down to
blast-off. Each department (group of stakeholders) must
affirmatively state that their aspect of the product is a "go".
When "all systems are go", then the product can launch.
Why use release checklists?
- Development teams do not use release checklists everyday.
- Throughout most of the development process, the issue tracker
is better.
- Only when all tracked issues for this release are resolved,
does the team switch to using the release checklist.
- It might take a week to work through the release
checklist
- The release checklist complements the issue tracker because
- All departments are represented equally
- Stakeholders must affirmatively state that they are
satisfied, silence does not imply commitment to support the
release later.
- When mistakes are made on one release, a release checklist is a
simple tool for process improvement on the next release. E.g.,
"let's never make that mistake again."
Example of a release checklist
example use case templatesample test plan templateProject plan template