A Free Release Readiness Checklist Template

What is a Release Readiness Checklist?

This is a list of steps that helps you determine whether the product or features you’ve been working on are ready to be rolled out to end users. This checklist can take different forms. It may be very detailed, guiding you through the release process step-by-step. Alternatively, it can be relatively brief and simply help you check that everything is ready for deployment to the production environment.  

In this blog post, we provide free checklist templates for both approaches. We also explain how to save your release readiness checklist as a template in Jira. This will allow your team to follow your organization’s guidelines and maintain consistency.

Why Keep this Checklist in Jira?

Jira offers rich functionality for effective project management, especially in the area of software development. It allows you to track dependencies, connect developer tools (such as GitHub), and sync dev statuses with your tickets automatically. It also has robust features for planning and managing releases. Jira enables you to gather work items in fix versions and manage everything from one page.

When you turn your release readiness checklist into a template for Jira, this means you can reuse it multiple times in Jira work items. So, every time your team is starting to get ready for the next release, you can import the pre-made checklist from the template. As a result, you will have a ready action plan and won’t have to start from scratch. 

This approach is especially useful when setting up a new process or introducing changes to an existing one. Furthermore, such a checklist is helpful for onboarding new teammates faster or for organizing your work with external clients. 

It enhances communication, provides transparency, and allows you to enforce the best practices, making them actionable. All this helps you streamline this part of the product development process.

Example of the Product Release Process

What exactly should be on your checklist depends on the specific workflow in your organization. Broadly speaking, it can include the following stages:

1. The team selects the scope for release. This can be a selection of Jira tickets. Commonly, the release will consist of the changes accumulated in the dev branch.
2. The changes selected for the release are merged to the staging branch.
3. QA engineers start testing the version deployed to staging.
4. New pull requests for found release blockers are opened to be merged to staging.  
5. Engineers must review these PRs.
6. Once testing is over and the QA team approves the release candidate, the responsible QA engineer must approve the PRs respective for the release.

While this outlines the essential steps of the release process, many more activities, tasks, and subtasks must be completed for a successful release. 

A well-prepared checklist will help your team keep track of them and communicate effectively. 

What Does a Release Readiness Checklist Typically Include?

Usually, it covers areas such as:

• Product testing: This section of the checklist helps you organize testing-related activities, including pre-QA preparations, test passing, and collaboration between the dev and QA teams.
• Documentation: A good checklist should help you verify that all the necessary materials are ready in advance and/or updated. For instance, user guides, release notes, and product documentation.
• Deployment planning: This helps you confirm that deployment scripts and required procedures are prepared and tested.
• Support training: Users may have questions about an update or new features you are about to release. It’s also possible there will be some user experience issues. So, it’s important to make sure that your customer support team is prepared to handle this and has enough information about the upcoming changes.
• Backup and rollback plans: This part of the checklist allows you to verify the readiness for possible emergencies and issues that can happen during or after the deployment.
• Securing approvals: Finally, you need to make sure that all the stakeholders involved in the process confirm that the release is good to go.

Of course, depending on your goals and processes, you can also add other stages.

Free Checklist Templates for Release Preparation

These hands-on checklists are offered to you for free by the Titan Apps team. To use the templates in Jira, copy them from the markdown blocks below and install Smart Checklist for Jira from the Atlassian Marketplace. We’ll explore this in more detail a bit later.

1. A Step-by-Step Release Readiness Checklist (Long Version)

This checklist takes you through the product release process and helps you prepare step-by-step. The action points are grouped by stages: from the initial arrangements to the staging cut, regression testing, and all the way down to the marketplace release and post-release activities. 

Each of the stages is pre-assigned to a specific role: a developer or a QA engineer. When using this release readiness checklist in Jira, instead of the tag placeholders, mention the responsible people in your team.

The template documents the whole process in an actionable way, making it easy to follow step by step. This ensures that nothing important is missing and everything is thoroughly prepared for the release. 

Preview Markdown view

### Pre-QA Steps @Dev
- Verify the Jira release/version is created and linked to relevant tickets
- Ensure release branches (back-end and front-end) are up to date
- Confirm release pull requests (PRs) are created and passing tests
- Add QA notes to tickets where necessary

### Preparation @QA
- List feature flags to be updated for regression and production
- Start a Slack/Teams release thread and link it to the Jira release ticket
- Prepare draft release notes/KB article if new features or UI/UX improvements are included

### Staging Release @Dev
- Merge changes into the staging branch and deploy to the staging environment
- Confirm the build is deployed successfully
- Notify QA via the release thread in Slack to start regression testing

### Regression Testing @QA
- Run regression tests based on defined test cases
- Log any release blockers in Jira and link them to the release ticket
- On success, notify the team and hand back to @Dev for production release

### Production Release @Dev
- Update version numbers and create a PR from staging -> production
- Merge to production and create a Git tag for the release
- Announce the release in the Slack/Teams thread
- Update environment variables (if needed)

### Marketplace Release @QA/@Dev
- Publish the new version on the Atlassian Marketplace
- Finalize and publish release notes and the Knowledge Base article
- Conduct quick smoke testing post-release
- Notify the team and support about the release, highlighting fixes and new features

### Post-Release Actions
- Back-merge production -> @Dev to keep branches in sync
- Mark release and related Jira tickets as “Released”
- Monitor key metrics and logs for the first 24–48 hours
- Celebrate ?

Copy Copied

For your convenience, we’ve split up this checklist into several sections so that you can review it stage-by-stage:

Smart Checklist allows you to make your release readiness checklist well-structured, feature-rich, and easy to work with. For example, you can: 

• Add headers for different stages of the release process
• Tag responsible developers, QAs, and approvers
• Include separate deadlines for different stages or checklist items
• Apply rich formatting, highlight with colour, and add emojis
• Set custom statuses for checklist items (“Next Up,” “Approval Pending,” etc.)
• Add links to external resources and websites
• Save checklists as templates and reuse them multiple times
• Include mandatory steps and integrate them into workflow automation. For example, prevent a work item from being moved to the next stage unless all the mandatory items are completed.

2. A Release Readiness Checklist for the Final Sign-Off (Short Version)

This checklist template doesn’t describe the process in such detail as the previous one. Instead, it covers the main preparation stages and allows you to quickly check what has already been done and what is still pending. 

It includes the testing phase, deployment planning, checking backup and rollback plans, and initial post-release monitoring. Furthermore, the checklist has a section dedicated to receiving approvals from stakeholders. This is especially useful when your team works with external clients and there are formal approval procedures in place. 

How to Set up a Release Readiness Checklist Template in Jira

1. Install Smart Checklist for Jira from the Atlassian Marketplace. 
2. Copy the release readiness checklist template we shared earlier. Open the Jira work item you created for this task. Then, paste the copied checklist into the Smart Checklist section of that work item. This can be an epic, task, story, subtask, or any other work type.
3. Customize the template using the Markdown editor (optional). Add or remove steps, tag responsible people and stakeholders, add deadlines, and include other details you may need. It’s also recommended to add links to the internal policies and product management best practices implemented in your organization. In this case, the template will be more helpful if you need to scale this process or onboard new team members.
4. Save the checklist as a template. Open the Smart Checklist menu (the three dots in the upper right corner) and save your checklist as a template, as shown in the image below. That’s it! Your release readiness checklist is now a template. 

After this, you can easily reuse it when preparing for the next iterations. Just click the same three-dot menu and select Import from a template. 

Who Should Manage The Release Readiness Checklist in an Agile Team?

Some teams have a dedicated release manager, but this is more of an exception than the norm. Most commonly, the release readiness checklist is managed collaboratively by the people who work with it and are involved in the process. This includes the development team, quality assurance engineers, and product managers. The template we shared earlier clearly identifies the roles responsible for each of the stages. So, when one stage is completed, the responsible person should notify those who will proceed with the next part.

To make the production readiness checklist actionable, it’s advisable to review it during daily standups once the preparations start. This enhances transparency and ensures that the checklist item statuses are kept up to date. Later, it can be used at the retrospective meeting to help the team come up with enhancements.

There’s also an opinion that the product owner or scrum master should manage such a checklist. However, it’s still best to involve the whole team. This makes the process more resilient and less dependent on one person.

For example, if the product owner has to unexpectedly take sick leave, with the up-to-date checklist, it’s easy to pick up where they left off. Everyone will know what to do and who is responsible for each part. For this reason, documenting processes end-to-end with Smart Checklist is helpful for many use cases beyond release management.

For more details about different approaches to organizing software releases in Jira, please refer to my article Jira Release Planning.

Article by Olga Cheban

Content Writer at TitanApps. I love it when my writing helps people find smarter ways to manage their time. Whether for individual professionals or large companies, even small changes in managing daily tasks can have a huge impact. My goal is to share practical advice that promotes efficiency and facilitates growth.