Release Management (Deep Workflow)

Releases combine coordination and risk management: what ships, when, how we verify, and how we recover.

When to Offer This Workflow

Trigger conditions:

• Scheduled or train-based releases; need predictable cadence
• Hotfix chaos or unclear ownership
• SemVer vs calendar versioning debates

Initial offer:

Use six stages: (1) versioning policy, (2) branching & tags, (3) release candidate & checklist, (4) communication, (5) deploy & verify, (6) post-release & hotfixes). Confirm deployment model (continuous delivery vs batch releases).

Stage 1: Versioning Policy

Goal: Define SemVer (or alternative) rules: what counts as breaking, how migrations are communicated, and how pre-releases work.

Exit condition: Written policy linking version numbers to customer-facing risk.

Stage 2: Branching & Tags

Goal: Choose a strategy (trunk-based with release branches, GitFlow-lite, etc.) and use annotated tags tied to changelog entries.

Stage 3: Release Candidate & Checklist

Goal: Freeze criteria: QA scope, DB migrations dry-run, feature flag defaults, config diffs, load/perf smoke for risky changes.

Stage 4: Communication

Goal: Internal notes for support/CS/SRE; external release notes with breaking changes highlighted and migration steps.

Stage 5: Deploy & Verify

Goal: Canary or progressive rollout where possible; SLO dashboards; rollback trigger agreed before deploy starts.

Stage 6: Post-Release & Hotfixes

Goal: Lightweight retro; hotfix branches from the release tag; forward-merge fixes back to main; track incidents linked to release.

Final Review Checklist

• [ ] Versioning and changelog reflect risk
• [ ] Branch/tag strategy is team-wide consensus
• [ ] Checklist covers migrations, flags, QA, and comms
• [ ] Rollback plan rehearsed or documented
• [ ] Hotfix process defined

Tips for Effective Guidance

• Smallest releasable increment reduces blast radius.
• Coordinate DB schema changes with expand/contract patterns when zero-downtime matters.
• Complement with ci-cd and changelog-authoring skills for tooling depth.

Handling Deviations

• SaaS with heavy feature-flagging: “release” may be continuous—still document communication and flag cleanup discipline.