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Friday Deployment Risk Index

Friday does not break production. Large changes without rollback, manual rituals, weak observability, and releases performed after everyone has mentally left for the weekend do.

A semi-serious release-readiness check. It does not replace engineering risk assessment and it does not ban Friday deployments.

12 questions · ~2 minutes

How brave is your Friday release?

Answer for the specific release you are about to ship. The higher the score, the more hope is participating in your release process alongside the engineering team.

01 When are you planning to press Deploy?

02 If you need to roll back, how clear and tested is the path?

03 Does this release include data migrations or irreversible changes?

No, or fully backward-compatibleSafe staged migrationMigration with a known return pathGoing back would be difficultAfter migration, there is no way back

04 How quickly will you know the release broke something?

Minutes: metrics, alerts and clear SLIsPretty quickly from dashboardsWe need to check several placesProbably through support reportsUsers will tell us

05 Are the signals for “stop the rollout” defined in advance?

06 How much of your user base can a bad change affect?

07 Can you disable the new functionality without another deployment?

08 How many manual “do not forget this” steps are in the release?

09 How large is the change set?

10 Who can diagnose trouble after the release?

11 Does someone actually stay to observe the system after deployment?

12 How painful would an incident be specifically tonight or over the weekend?