Software release checklist for smooth deployments in 2024
No matter how many weeks of careful release planning your team puts in, release day often brings unexpected roadbumps. Maybe it's a configuration mismatch that wasn't caught in staging or a critical security check that someone forgot to run.
In January 2024, CrowdStrike experienced this firsthand when a botched release caused their Falcon platform to crash on thousands of customer endpoints. This led to significant service disruptions and a 15% drop in their stock price.
They're not alone. According to the 2024 State of Production Readiness Report, 98% of engineering leaders have witnessed serious consequences for failing to meet production readiness standards. These incidents range from minor service disruptions to major outages that impact customer trust and the bottom line.
The root causes are often predictable and preventable: last-minute code changes that bypass review processes, miscommunication between teams, inconsistent version control practices, and critical steps that fall through the cracks during the pressure of deployment. This is where a well-structured software release checklist helps.
In this article, we'll explore why a software release checklist is instrumental for development teams, what they should include, and how teams should use them.
What is a software release checklist?
A software release checklist is a step-by-step guide that helps teams manage the release process and ensures all essential actions are completed to avoid issues. These checklists typically span the entire software development lifecycle, including design validation and architecture review, development completion criteria, security and compliance checks, deployment procedures, and post-release monitoring and validation. Standardizing these steps can reduce human error, maintain consistency across releases, and help make best practices a routine.
What teams use software release checklists?
Software release checklists are important to keep people on different teams on the same page and know the status of a deployment. Here's how a few key teams use checklists:
Development teams use checklists to validate code quality, ensure proper testing coverage, and verify that all dependencies are properly managed before deployment.
QA teams verify functionality, performance, and user experience across different environments and scenarios.
Security teams enforce security controls, verify vulnerability scanning results, and ensure compliance requirements are met.
Operations teams validate infrastructure readiness, confirm monitoring setup, and ensure proper backup and rollback plans are in place.
Product and project managers track progress, coordinate cross-team dependencies, and ensure all stakeholder requirements are satisfied before release.
Types of software release checklists
There is no one-size-fits-all checklist that suits every organization because every company has specific contexts and needs. For instance, a startup pushing multiple releases every day needs a different process than a large financial institution that handles sensitive customer data and has a few releases every year.
The three most common types of release checklists align with the steps for a successful software deployment: pre-release, post-release, and continuous delivery.
Pre-release checklists focus on validation and preparation steps before deployment, such as code review signoffs, testing completion verification, and environment readiness checks. These checklists help prevent issues before they can impact production.
Post-release checklists guide teams through monitoring, validation, and stabilization after deployment, including verifying application health, monitoring key metrics, and documenting the release. These checklists help teams quickly identify and respond to any issues that emerge after deployment.
Continuous delivery checklists are streamlined for high-frequency releases with a focus on automated testing, progressive deployments, and quick validation steps that can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines. These checklists help ensure quality while moving quickly.
Benefits of a release management checklist
Without structured release processes, teams often face high post-release failure rates, unclear ownership of tasks, and inefficiencies that lead to delays.
Production readiness
A well-designed release checklist ensures that your entire system is prepared to handle real-world usage and all aspects of production readiness are verified, from infrastructure scaling to monitoring setup. This systematic approach helps teams maintain high reliability and avoid the "it works on my machine" syndrome.
Minimized risk
Release checklists act as a safety net by enforcing consistent verification of critical factors that could impact production and helping teams identify potential issues early when they're cheaper and easier to fix. A proactive approach significantly reduces the likelihood of production incidents, customer-impacting bugs, and emergency rollbacks.
Stakeholder alignment
Having a shared understanding of what "ready" means for deployment helps keep different teams on the same page. With release checklists, stakeholders have visibility into the release status and ideally, there are fewer last-minute surprises.
Streamlined communication
With many disparate teams contributing to releases, stakeholders can find themselves in back-to-back meetings to get status updates and align on who owns what. Release checklists eliminate the confusion and overhead of constant meetings and email threads, and they provide a single source of truth for release updates.
Key components of a software release checklist
Software release checklists support all stages of the software development lifecycle. Here are the key phases and components of a software release checklist:
Testing and quality assurance
Verify that all unit tests pass and have adequate coverage metrics. Building on this foundation, run integration tests in production-like environments to catch interface and dependency issues that might not surface in isolated testing. Performance testing comes next to ensure your application meets acceptable response times and throughput under anticipated load conditions. Finally, stakeholders should sign off on user acceptance testing to certify that the software meets business requirements and user expectations.
Version control
Every code change must be properly committed and pushed to the main branch, with clear commit messages that document the purpose and impact of the changes. Create and document release tags to mark significant versions and enable easy rollbacks if needed. Also, pay special attention to dependency management—all external libraries and components should be properly versioned and locked to prevent unexpected changes during deployment.
Documentation
Internal documentation should reflect the current state of the system and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Create release notes that detail new features, bug fixes, and any breaking changes, written to be accessible to your target audience. Keep API documentation synchronized with any interface changes to prevent integration issues. Update architecture diagrams to accurately represent any modifications to system components or interactions.
Security checks
Security verification must be integrated into the release process, not treated as an optional add-on. Complete CISA's Secure Software Development Attestation Form to ensure compliance with federal security standards. Run security scanning tools against both your code and infrastructure, addressing any critical findings before proceeding. Conduct thorough dependency vulnerability checks to identify and remediate any known security issues in third-party components. Finally, verify that access controls and permissions are properly configured across all environments and components.
Deployment steps
Prepare and test any required database migrations to make sure they can be applied safely and rolled back if necessary. Configure feature flags to control the rollout of new functionality and minimize risk. Set up load balancers to enable zero-downtime deployment through techniques like blue-green deployments or canary releases. Document and test rollback procedures thoroughly. When incidents occur, you'll be glad to have a well-tested backup plan.
Post-release monitoring
Active monitoring after deployment is crucial for maintaining system health and quickly identifying any issues. Implement comprehensive tracking of key metrics and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to ensure the system is performing as expected. Configure logging to capture relevant application and system events with appropriate detail levels. Set up and test alerting systems to notify the right teams when problems occur, and ensure error tracking is capturing and properly categorizing any application errors or exceptions. Finally, maintain active performance monitoring to track system resource utilization and response times across all components.
Each of these components should be formatted in your checklist with clear indicators for:
Current status (not started, in progress, complete, blocked)
Owner responsible for completion
Priority level (critical, high, medium, low)
Dependencies on other tasks
Completion criteria
Software release checklist template
While every team's release process has unique requirements, having a solid foundation to build upon can improve your release processes. This template is a starting point that you can customize based on your specific needs, compliance requirements, and team structure.
Pre-deployment phase
Code review and validation
Obtain code review approval from at least two senior engineers
Resolve all PR comments and discussions
Verify code coverage exceeds minimum thresholds (typically >80%)
Run static code analysis and resolve any critical issues
Enable and verify branch protection rules
Testing verification
Execute unit test suite across all components
Complete integration testing in staging environment
Run and verify end-to-end test scenarios
Conduct performance testing and validate results against baselines
Perform security scanning and address any high-severity findings
Execute load tests under expected production conditions
Documentation and communication
Draft and review release notes
Update technical documentation with new changes
Synchronize API documentation with latest changes
Prepare customer-facing documentation
Notify stakeholders of deployment timeline
Brief support team on new features and changes
Deployment phase
Environment preparation
Back up production database
Test migration scripts in staging environment
Configure and verify feature flags
Validate environment variables across all services
Check SSL certificate expiration dates
Prepare and verify cache warming strategy
Deployment execution
Communicate deployment window to all stakeholders
Execute database migrations
Deploy application to production environment
Clear CDN cache if required
Verify DNS changes have propagated
Run health checks across all services
Verification
Test application responsiveness
Verify database connections
Test all third-party integrations
Validate critical user paths
Enable monitoring systems
Configure and test alert thresholds
Post-deployment phase
Monitoring and validation
Monitor error rates against defined thresholds
Verify response times meet SLA requirements
Check CPU/Memory utilization patterns
Monitor database performance metrics
Track user activity patterns
Review logs for unexpected errors
Documentation and cleanup
Update changelog with deployment details
Record deployment in incident tracking system
Remove temporary testing accounts
Reset debug logging to normal levels
Archive deployment artifacts
Tag release in version control system
Want more checklists? Our developer onboarding checklist can help improve the DevEx.
Best practices for creating and using software release checklists effectively
Creating and maintaining effective release checklists presents several challenges. Teams often struggle with balancing comprehensiveness and usability, keeping checklists updated as processes evolve, and ensuring consistent adoption across different teams and projects.
Tailor checklists based on project complexity and team needs
For smaller projects or frequent releases, focus on streamlined checklists with critical paths and high-risk areas. For larger, more complex systems, create more detailed checklists that account for additional dependencies and compliance requirements. Consider creating different checklist templates for different types of releases, such as feature releases, hotfixes, or infrastructure updates.
Automate repetitive tasks
Manual verification of every checklist item quickly becomes unsustainable as release frequency increases. Identify opportunities to automate verification steps through your CI/CD pipeline and integrate automated testing, security scanning, and deployment verification into your build process. Use tools that can automatically update checklist status based on pipeline results, which will save time, reduce human error, and give you more consistent results.
Embed security checks early and often
Security shouldn't be a last-minute consideration. Integrate security checks throughout your release process, starting from the development phase. Include automated security testing in your CI pipeline, perform regular dependency vulnerability checks, and maintain a separate security-focused section in your checklist for manual verification steps. Make security sign-off a requirement for production deployments.
Regularly review and update checklists
Schedule regular reviews with team leads and stakeholders to gather feedback and evaluate checklist effectiveness. After major incidents or close calls, consider whether additional checklist items could have prevented the issue. Remove or modify items that no longer provide value or have been superseded by automation. Document the reasoning behind critical checklist items to maintain institutional knowledge as team members change.
Collaborate across teams to build checklists
When you create and update checklists, include representatives from development, operations, security, and QA. Each team brings unique perspectives on potential risks and necessary verifications. Product managers can provide insight into business-critical features that need extra attention, while support teams can highlight common issues that should be verified before release.
Use internal developer portals (IDP) for checklist management
IDPs provide a centralized platform for managing release checklists, automating verifications, and maintaining deployment documentation. They can automatically populate checklist items based on service architecture, track completion status, and integrate with existing tools. This improves visibility, reduces manual overhead, and helps enforce consistent practices across teams.
How can Cortex help?
Managing successful software releases becomes increasingly complex as your organization grows. Cortex provides robust support for release management through several key features:
Production readiness scoring: Move beyond simple checklist completion with Cortex's Scorecards that assess production readiness. This feature automates checks for code quality, security, documentation, and other key standards and it ensures that every release meets predefined criteria before going live.
Automated CI/CD pipelines: Cortex integrates with tools like Jenkins
and GitLab and automates critical parts of the release process, such as testing, deployment, and validation. This makes releases faster and more reliable by minimizing manual intervention and ensuring that all necessary tasks are completed before deployment.Centralized service catalog: With centralized information in the service catalog, teams have clearer ownership and visibility. This reduces confusion and ensures accountability throughout the release process.
Incident response and post-release monitoring: While not directly
part of the release itself, Cortex’s Incident Response capabilities
help track and respond to any issues that arise after a release. Integrating with on-call systems like PagerDuty ensures quick responses to production incidents, which is essential for maintaining uptime and performance after deployment.
To learn more about Cortex, book a demo.
