reviewing-release-runbook — SKILL.md

Variant: standard · When to use: judging a finished release/deployment runbook as an acceptance gate — checking an unfamiliar on-call engineer can execute the deploy, confirm it, and roll back from the runbook alone, then emitting VERDICT: approve|revise with actionable findings.

Overview

This skill is the review half of an authoring/judging release-runbook pair. Loaded by a reviewer who holds a finished release/deployment runbook — the operational go-live procedure a deploying or on-call engineer follows to ship a system to production safely and verifiably (prerequisites and sign-offs, pre-deploy go/no-go, the ordered deploy procedure, post-deploy verification, the rollback procedure, escalation, and monitoring pointers) — it judges that document against one question: could an engineer who has never deployed this system execute the release, confirm it succeeded, and roll back safely from this runbook alone, with no secret inlined and nothing fabricated? It applies a fixed 11-condition executability + safety checklist — the same bar a release-runbook author produces to (the author's Step-6 + Step-7 self-check), so the produce-bar and the review-bar do not drift — then emits a single machine-parseable verdict plus findings the author can act on in one revision pass. It also reviews an amend (a versioned delta against an existing runbook) as a delta-scoped review (cond. 9). It is an acceptance gate: it does not author, fix, or rewrite the runbook; it judges and returns findings, and the producer revises.

The bar is single-sourced with the authoring-release-runbook skill — the same 11 executability/safety conditions a release-runbook author produces to. The reviewer does not invent a private standard.

When to activate

• A finished release/deployment runbook needs an accept/revise decision before it ships to the deploying / on-call engineer.
• You are the independent reviewer / gate for a runbook a producer just authored, and you have the upstream documents (architecture-doc / technical-design / test-plan) to spot-check commands and verification against.
• Re-judging a revised runbook after a prior revise verdict.

Do NOT activate when: