Comparison
Design reviewvsOperational readiness review
Design review
you presented the design and spent forty minutes on a question you had not thought to ask yourself.
A scheduled conversation where a design is examined by people who are not building it. Done well it hunts for the assumption nobody stated and the failure mode nobody costed; done badly it is a status meeting with slides, or a place where the most senior voice wins by default. Going in, the useful preparation is not polish but knowing which parts you are least sure about, because those are the only parts worth the room's time.
Full entry →Operational readiness review
before it can take real traffic, someone checks it has alerts, a runbook, a rollback, an owner and a restore that has been tested.
A structured check that a service is genuinely operable before it goes live: ownership, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, dependency limits, rollback and recovery. It is the mechanism that stops the gap between working code and a supportable service being discovered during the first incident. Its value depends on being a short list of things that have actually caused incidents here, rather than a long generic form.
Full entry →