Change Risk Rollback

• Key risks and failure modes are identified and bounded
• Rollback options are explicit and traceable to versions/tags
• Mitigations are aligned to quality gates and environment traceability
• Decision to proceed is reviewable and justified

Process

1. Source Review: Inspect the proposed changes, deployment environment, and current telemetry/monitoring coverage.
2. Implementation: Identify potential failure modes and define the corresponding rollback or remediation steps.
3. Verification: Conduct a walkthrough or simulation of the rollback plan to ensure it is executable and effective.
4. Documentation: Record the risk assessment and rollback plan in the change request or as an ADR for high-risk architectural changes.
5. Review: Release Manager/SRE and Tech Lead must validate the feasibility and completeness of the rollback strategy.

Example Test / Validation

• For a change, identify at least one failure mode and define a rollback path
• Verify rollback candidate versions/tags can be identified from traceability records
• Confirm mitigations are in place for highest-likelihood/highest-impact failures

Common Red Flags / Guardrail Violations

• “We can just hotfix it”
• Relying on manual steps without documentation
• Deploying without tags, making rollback ambiguous
• Treating rollback as “restore from backup” without feasibility validation

Recommended Review Personas

• Tech Lead – validates risk framing and scope discipline
• Platform/DevOps Engineer – validates deployment/rollback feasibility
• Domain Expert – validates business/functional failure impacts
• Security Reviewer – validates integrity risks where applicable

Skill Priority

P0 – Safety & Integrity

Conflict Resolution Rules

• Overrides delivery pressure when rollback/risk is unclear
• Requires traceability (versions/tags); no rollback plan without provenance
• If risk cannot be bounded, escalate and defer release

Conceptual Dependencies

• incremental-change-impact
• release-tagging-plan
• environment-traceability

Classification

Core
Governance

Notes

Rollback is not a plan if it cannot be executed from recorded state.