Software launch checklist

The software launch checklist is a list of tasks that need to be completed during a major release, like an initial site launch.

The checklist helps ensure that all tasks are completed prior to a launch, reducing risk, and helps with following up on what needs to be done once launch is complete. When people see all the tasks listed and who owns each item, it increases confidence that the launch will be successful.

Being transparent and communicating about what is going on is important to the success of the launch. We encourage teams to document everything on the checklist, so it can be revisited after launch and used to improve planning for future launches.

What should it look like?

You can use any tool to create a software launch checklist. We suggest using the following fields:

• Date and Time: When do we expect this to be completed? How long will it take to complete this?

• Owner: Who owns this item in the checklist?

• Status: What is the status of this? One of: Pending, Started/In Progress, Completed/Done, Blocked

• Task: What is expected of this task?

• Comments: Any notes that would like to be reviewed at a later time. This can be used for reflection meetings and to improve the checklist for the next time.

Example

Questions to consider

Here are some questions to consider when creating your checklist.

Readiness plans

What can we do to get this launch ready?

• Are there any known bugs that need to be addressed and/or communicated? Are they considered blockers? What is the plan to handle these bugs? Will they affect users’ experience? What is the back up plan?
• Are there any errors or warnings logged during automated CI/CD testing? Are they all documented as issues or tickets? Are any of them severe enough that the team should consider postponing until they are addressed?
• Was there manual testing done? Has testing been done in production?
• Which branch will we use for the launch? Is a “code freeze” window needed? If the team uncovers a bug and needs to push a fix during code freeze, who would approve that exception?

Deployment plans

What needs to be done to make the launch a success from a technical point of view?

• What kind of network configuration is needed? What about firewall rules? DNS configuration?
• Has the production environment been set up? What about configuration? What about environment variables? What about secret keys?
• Are users set up with correct access? Administration access? User access? Are permissions set correctly?

Communication plans

What kind of communication needs to happen before, during, and after launch? Think of different audiences, such as:

• Stakeholders/Management: What kind of updates do you want to share with stakeholders? How much do they want to know?
• Internal staff: What will they expect? What kind of communication should they be prepared to communicate with customers?
• Third party partners: Are there any partners that are dependencies for making this a successful launch? Do they know about the launch plan? Do they have on-call support ready for us? For example: Cloud.gov and Login.gov.
• Customers: Will customers experience downtime during the launch? Login issues? Are they aware of the new changes? Do they have a way of reaching out for assistance after the launch? Do we have any social media communications plan? Do we have a blog post?

Testing plans

What kind of testing do we need to do to ensure the launch is complete and successful?

• Internal hands-on testing: What kind of testing do we need to do to complement automated tests?
• External hands-on testing: Do we have someone who can help with testing the launch? Is their access set correctly? How can our stakeholders try out the launch, how can we show them our work?

Monitor/Tracking plans

How can we monitor the health of the launch?

• Length of monitoring: How long should we monitor after the launch? Do we need to do a daily report based on monitoring?
• Monitoring tools: Where can we see monitoring? Cloud dashboard? Console logs?
• Logging: What logs does the software need to maintain? How does the team access the logs? What information is being logged? Is the flag set correctly for log (Debug vs Warning)?
• Traffic: How many hits are we seeing? Is there a certain area that is getting higher traffic than normal? Is it throwing any errors? Is the traffic volume within expected range?
• Bandwidth: How much bandwidth is the application using? Any large files being uploaded or downloaded?
• CPU/RAM Utilization: Is there something that is using too much CPU? Do we have memory leaks? Is the utilization load stable?
• E-mail: Are we doing email blast communicating about the launch? How many emails are going out each hour or day? How fast are they sending out? Are people opening links to the new site?

Feedback plans

What can we do with this information to help us improve the process next time?

• Do we have a place for people to share their comments and/or experience? What will we do with the feedback we get?
• If things didn't go well, what can we do differently next time?

We hope this checklist and these questions will help make your launch a successful one!

Resources:

18F only, 18F Launch Preparation

18F only, Examples of other project launch checklists