Release Quality Gates are checkpoints or criteria which must be met before a release can progress to the production stage of the release pipeline. These gates ensure that the release quality is high and meets the necessary standards and requirements, minimizing the risk of introducing defects and vulnerabilities into production environments.
Release quality gates should be defined by the SRE team. SRE team should verify that all quality gates are passed before approving the release into production.
Below are some release management quality gates and associated artifacts to be provided by project/CD teams as part of production release sign off from the SRE team and other key stakeholders such as product owners, project managers, or business leaders.
Code Quality - Checks for coding standards, adherence to best practices
> 80% of stories/requirements should be automated
Automation testing
Pass rate of Smoke test should be 100%
Pass rate of regression testing to be >80%. If it less than 80%, SRE and project team should agree on open defects
Performance Testing
No degradation should be reported in Performance testing runs
There should be 0 P1/P2/eP3 defects
Acceptance Testing validating release meets needs and expectations
BAT/UAT sign off by business
Security scan, Vulnerability checks
Security Sign off
Documentation (Deployment Plan, Rollback Strategy), Release Notes
MOP (Deployment guide) to be reviewed and approved
Transition sign off by SRE team
Performance Monitoring and Logging
Monitoring tool set up in Production to quickly identify and address issues post deployment
Other Considerations
Contact details and process to be defined for external vendors, integration teams (Applicable for SaaS projects)
For a new project/program, new Queue to be created (if applicable) to manage production incidents
Incident priorities, support model to be agreed for new projects, for Production
