Definition
The degree to which a planned software release has been evaluated for potential risks to production stability, data integrity, and customer experience — beyond what automated tests cover. Release readiness asks: 'Have we checked what could go wrong when this reaches users?' CI passing is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
Why it matters
Most teams ship when CI is green and call it done. But CI only validates code logic — not schema state, not downstream data dependencies, not whether a column removal will break a service that was added two years ago and has no tests. Release readiness is the practice of catching what CI misses before production does.
How Well Tested handles it
Well Tested provides a release readiness score that blends engineering signals (CI events, commit frequency), cross-signals (table diffs, schema changes, SEO checks), and recurrence risk (historical failure patterns). It surfaces the specific risks and links them to evidence — so the release decision is based on data, not gut feel.
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