Preparing for your go live begins well before the build phase completes; it begins during Prepare, or even before that, and typically starts with your Day 1 Go Live plan. As part of your plan, and as your project progresses, you will have decided the best way to roll out the new application or new features. Go live readiness requires a number of activities to be completed before you are truly ready to press the release button. Use our Go Live Criteria Checklist to evaluate how ready you are, focusing on people, process and technology. Key activities:

• Your user stories and other product backlog items have been built, tested, and accepted by the product owner i.e. you application is ready
• If you have outstanding defects, acceptable workarounds are in place
• User adoption plan in action
• Performance and security tests successfully completed
• Your go live plan including backup/restore process is in place, including a go live run sheet
• Review the outcomes metrics
• Any outage agreed with the business
• A go-live communication plan agreed
• Engage the Pega Global Customer Support (GCS) team to ensure a smooth transition into production e.g. establishing R&Rs and how to raise tickets
• A post go-live support plan confirmed

The Pega platform provides tools to help you determine the health of the application; the Application Quality Dashboard, which provides you with a snapshot of the guardrail score and automated test coverage, and the Pega Diagnostic Cloud, which provides hardware and performance warnings.

Pre go-live planning should include a handoff and knowledge transfer to the teams who will maintain the application after deployment, ensuring ongoing support for Infrastructure, platform, and the application is provided. Planning will help reduce interruptions and customer service issues for end users. The specific steps for go-live and the owners responsible for executing the steps should be identified, as well as any post go-live smoke tests or other tests to validate the production deployment. There should also be steps for post-production release monitoring, to identify any adverse impacts or issues experienced by end users. These conversations should be taking place well in advance of the go-live date.

A go/no-go meeting should be held by the Scrum team and other key stakeholders to review any open issues, open risks, and unresolved defects to collectively decide if the application is ready for production.

What happens next? Go Live! (If the go/no-go decision is go)

The related content links below provide methods and tools to help you.