Shipping And Launch

---
name: shipping-and-launch
description: Review changes, open PRs, run pre-launch checks, staged rollouts, and rollback. Use when preparing to ship to production or closing out a branch.
---

# Shipping and Launch

## Overview

Shipping is review → PR → checklist → staged rollout → monitor. Small, frequent releases beat large batches. Do not skip review because launch checklists exist, and do not ship because staging looked fine without production safeguards.

## When to Use

- Reviewing and opening/updating a PR before merge
- Preparing to deploy to production
- Launching a feature behind flags
- After code review and quality gates pass

## End-to-end workflow

### 1. Review the change

Gather context: diff against base branch, uncommitted changes, recent commits, changed files, and user intent from recent chats if useful.

```bash
git fetch origin main
git diff origin/main...HEAD
git status
gh pr checks --json name,bucket,state,workflow,link
```

Then:

1. Run targeted tests for changed behavior; add tests or document gaps.
2. Review for correctness, regressions, security, and intent fit. Use parallel subagents on large diffs.
3. Fix critical issues and re-run affected tests.
4. Commit focused changes with a concise message.
5. Push and open or update the PR.

Prioritize correctness, security, and regressions over style-only comments. Fix pre-commit failures; never bypass hooks. Use `gh pr checks` as the source of truth for PR readiness.

**Output:** findings (critical / warning / note), tests run, PR URL.

### 2. Complete pre-launch checklist

**Code quality:** tests pass, review approved, no critical/high issues, coverage meets threshold.

**Security:** no secrets in code/config, dependency audit clean, inputs validated, auth tested.

**Performance:** baseline established, no CWV/regression, no N+1, load tested if throughput-sensitive.

**Operational:** feature flag ready, monitoring configured, rollback tested, staging verified.

### 3. Deploy and roll out

1. Deploy to staging; run smoke tests; check dashboards.
2. Roll out in stages: internal → canary (1–5%) → expanded (25–50%) → GA.
3. Monitor at each stage; rollback if metrics degrade.
4. After GA, monitor 24–48 hours and schedule flag cleanup.

### 4. Rollback when needed

**Automatic triggers:** error rate, SLO breach, health check failures.

**Manual rollback:** identify bad deployment → revert to last good → verify → communicate → root-cause before redeploy.

## Feature flag lifecycle

Create (off) → develop behind flag → test internally → gradual rollout → GA → remove flag and dead code path.

## Anti-Rationalization

| Excuse | Counter |
|--------|---------|
| "It works on staging, ship it" | Staging does not replicate production traffic and data. |
| "We can monitor after launch" | Monitoring must exist before launch. |
| "Rollback is too slow, fix forward" | Fix-forward under pressure adds risk. |
| "Staged rollout is too slow" | Staged rollouts beat incident response. |
| "Flag cleanup can wait" | Flags become permanent debt. Schedule cleanup now. |

## Verification

- [ ] Review complete; critical issues resolved
- [ ] PR checks green
- [ ] Pre-launch checklist complete
- [ ] Feature flag and monitoring configured
- [ ] Rollback tested
- [ ] Stakeholders informed