Release Readiness Gate

Release Readiness Gate is a VibeControls concept for deciding, service by service, whether a release is ready to promote. It is designed to evaluate every service included in a PlanMagnet release against the team's scorecard thresholds, and to hold the whole release when any one of them falls short. The reason is stated in plain terms, so nobody has to decode a red light.

In a software company where coding agents now write a growing share of changes, the pace of change outruns the checklist. A release can bundle half a dozen services from different teams. The questions on-call depends on, such as whether a runbook exists, whether an error-rate alert is configured and whether each agent-authored change arrived with an approved plan, are often answered from memory in a meeting just before promotion.

The illustration shows a sample release opened inside a vibe, with a chip naming the linked PlanMagnet release and a status chip reading hold with two blockers. Four tiles count the services in the release, those passing the gate, those blocked, and the AI-authored changes alongside how many arrived with an approved plan. The main table lists each service with its owner team, a gold, silver or bronze tier, a numeric score, runbook and alert status, approved agent plans against changes made, and a pass or blocked result. For the selected blocked service, a side panel explains why it misses the gate: in the sample, a missing runbook link, an unconfigured error-rate alert and test coverage under its threshold, next to two checks that pass, a golden-path scaffold and an owner on the on-call rotation.

Below those reasons, a lead can open a fix plan or assign the work to the owner. The header adds Re-evaluate and Request exception, and the design envisions exceptions as time-boxed rather than open-ended. The gate builds on other VibeControls concepts: tiers and scores from the software catalog and quality scorecards, golden-path templates, and human-approved plans for agent work.

A footnote records that the gate result is posted to the PlanMagnet readiness checklist, with the time it was evaluated. The design intent is that PlanMagnet, where product and engineering plan the release, receives the same pass or hold the engineering view shows, so a release is never marked ready in one place while it is blocked in another.