release-readiness-review

name	release-readiness-review
description	Use before merging, shipping, publishing, or handing off work. Runs subagents for verification, regression risk, operational readiness, docs, compatibility, and unresolved follow-ups.

Release Readiness Review

Trigger

When the user asks if work is ready to merge/release/ship, prepare a release note, check readiness, or assess final risk after implementation.

Non-goals

Do not claim readiness without verification evidence. Do not hide unresolved risks in prose.

Operating principles

• Stay evidence-led. Every non-obvious conclusion must be backed by file paths, symbols, command output, issue/PR links, or source references.
• Keep subagents narrow. Give each subagent one question, a bounded search area, and an explicit output contract.
• Prefer read-only exploration until the parent task explicitly asks for edits.
• Separate facts, inferences, risks, and recommendations.
• Do not rely on repository claims alone. Verify against source code, tests, CI, docs, generated artifacts, runtime behavior, and external specifications when available.
• Treat commands as evidence only when their exact command line, environment assumptions, and result are recorded.
• Preserve user intent. Do not widen scope without stating the proposed scope change.
• Be portable across stacks. Infer language, framework, build system, package manager, test runner, and CI from the repository rather than assuming any one ecosystem.

Subagent orchestration rules

Use subagents when the task benefits from context isolation, parallel exploration, independent verification, or specialized expertise. Do not spawn subagents for a one-shot formatting task.

When spawning subagents, pass this minimum packet:

1. Objective: one sentence describing the question to answer.
2. Scope: files, folders, PR diff, services, packages, or docs to inspect.
3. Constraints: read-only vs write, commands allowed, network/doc lookup allowed, and timeout.
4. Required evidence: exact files/symbols/commands/sources to cite.
5. Output schema: use the schema requested by the skill.

Parent-agent responsibilities:

• Assign non-overlapping scopes when possible.
• Wait for all requested subagents unless a blocking failure makes remaining work irrelevant.
• Cross-check subagent conclusions against each other.
• Resolve conflicts explicitly. Do not silently choose the more confident subagent.
• Produce one synthesized result with a risk-ranked decision, not a paste of raw subagent notes.

Recommended subagents

• test-verifier — Run or inspect test/build/lint/typecheck/CI gates and summarize what passed, failed, or was skipped.
• correctness-reviewer — Review whether implementation meets stated requirements and preserves existing behavior.
• security-reliability-reviewer — Review failure modes, secrets, access control, data handling, concurrency, and reliability hazards.
• release-risk-reviewer — Assess release notes, migration/rollback plan, observability, config, compatibility, and docs needs.
• external-researcher — Check external release/publish requirements or changelog constraints if relevant.

Workflow

1. Clarify the release unit: PR, branch, package, service, version, artifact, or deployment.
2. Collect the intended change summary and acceptance criteria.
3. Run or inspect verification gates; explicitly record skipped gates and why.
4. Assess operational readiness: rollback, migration, observability, compatibility, docs, support impact.
5. Return a release decision with blockers and exact follow-up items.

Required final output

Return results in this order:

1. Decision / state — ready, not ready, inconclusive, or needs follow-up.
2. Evidence summary — the smallest set of facts that supports the decision.
3. Findings — severity, title, affected area, evidence, impact, and recommendation.
4. Gaps / unknowns — what was not verified and why.
5. Next work items — ordered, scoped, and testable.

Use severity labels consistently:

• blocker: likely correctness, security, data loss, compliance, release, or customer-impact issue.
• high: real risk with plausible production impact or major maintainability cost.
• medium: important gap, incomplete test, migration risk, or design debt.
• low: useful improvement with limited impact.
• info: context, observation, or non-actionable note.

Skill-specific output schema

# Release readiness review

## Release unit

## Decision
ready | not ready | ready with risks | inconclusive

## Verification matrix
| Gate | Command/source | Result | Evidence | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|

## Blockers
| Severity | Issue | Evidence | Required action |
|---|---|---|---|

## Operational readiness
- Rollback:
- Migration:
- Observability:
- Docs/release notes:
- Compatibility:

## Final checklist
- [ ] ...

Useful shared references

When this package is copied whole, use these templates as needed:

• shared/references/evidence-ledger-template.md
• shared/references/review-report-template.md
• shared/references/research-brief-template.md
• shared/references/spec-compliance-matrix-template.md
• shared/references/benchmark-report-template.md
• shared/references/review-severity-rubric.md
• shared/references/safe-research-practices.md