Can we ship?
At the end of a release somebody has to answer that, usually in a meeting, usually from memory. AxonQA answers it in a sentence, backed by conditions you set in advance and evidence anyone can check.
Not a traffic light. A green badge cannot say “ready, with two things you are accepting”, and that is the state most real releases are in.
1.4 · Checkout hardening
Sample Storefront · opened 4 August 2026
- Environment
- Staging
- Record
- RR-1.4-01
Ready to ship, with 2 things you are accepting.
Everything that must hold, holds. The rest were accepted by a person, with a reason.
Judged against the project's bar as it stood when the report was made. Later changes to the bar do not change this record.
9 conditions
Matched to this release
5 of 5
Can never be accepted
4 of 4
2 met, 2 accepted
- Pass rate94%, bar is 90%met
- No failure at or above highnonemet
- No open bug above highnonemet
- Every manual phase finished3 of 3met
- Coverage of the release's stories100%, bar is 80%met
- No test in the plan quarantinednonemet
- Evidence no older than 7 days1 day oldmet
- No unreviewed requirement drift1 storyaccepted
Claire Bennett, 7 Aug. The criteria changed wording only. Re-reviewed informally before sign-off.
- Every failure has an owner1 failureaccepted
Claire Bennett, 7 Aug. STORE-131 is parked for 1.5 and will be picked up with that release.
Written once and never rewritten. This is the real published sample, figures and all.
Open the full recordThe evidence chain
The release exists before the report does
Create it in the project and it becomes selectable wherever the evidence is produced. Automation, API and manual results flow into the same release; the evaluator uses the latest result for each test in the release's readiness environment.
Release 4.2
Shared evidence container
Step 1 of 5
Create the release
A release is created before the decision. It becomes a named place that every relevant testing area can attach results to.
Release
4.2 · Checkout improvements
Readiness environment
Staging
Release 4.2 is open
Now selectable across the project
Choose a step, or move through the release from creation to frozen assessment.
Results from other environments stay visible as supporting evidence. They never silently replace the target-environment result. When you assess, AxonQA freezes the evidence, rules and verdict at that moment; later runs update the live release and belong to the next assessment.
The verdict
Three answers, because there are three real situations
Most releases are not clean and not blocked. They ship with known, deliberate compromises, and the honest tooling says so.
Ready to ship.
Every condition you set is met. Nothing is being waved through.
Ready to ship, with two things you are accepting.
The compromises are named, attributed and reasoned. This is where most releases actually live, and it is the state a badge cannot express.
Not ready to ship.
A must condition failed and nobody has accepted it. The gate does not argue; it tells you which one.
The bar
Conditions you set once, matched to the release
Each is a must or a should. Musts block the release; shoulds need a reason to pass. You choose which apply and where the thresholds sit.
Pass rate
mustAcross everything in the release plan.
Reads from Automated runs
No failure in tests at or above a priority
mustOne catastrophic failure among 300 passes still reads as 99 per cent, which is why this is its own line.
Reads from Test priority
No open bug above a severity
mustCounted against bugs linked to this plan.
Reads from Bug tracking
Every manual phase finished
mustA phase nobody ran is not a phase that passed.
Reads from Manual execution
Coverage of the release's stories
mustOnly the stories this release touches, not the whole project.
Reads from Requirements
No test in the plan quarantined
shouldA quarantined test is an unknown. Counting it as a pass is how a known fault ships.
Reads from Automation health
No unreviewed requirement drift
shouldYou cannot call a release ready when the acceptance criteria moved and nobody checked the tests still mean anything.
Reads from Tracker sync
Every failure has an owner
shouldAn unassigned failure is nobody's job.
Reads from Assignment
Why it needs one workspace
This verdict cannot be assembled from separate tools
Look at the last line on every condition above. Each reads from a different part of the platform.
A tool that only runs automation has no manual phases to check, so it cannot know whether a person ever worked the exploratory pass. A tool that only manages test cases runs nothing, so it has no pass rate of its own. Neither has your bug severities, your story coverage and your requirement drift sitting in the same place as the run.
You could rebuild this by hand every release, in a spreadsheet, from four tools and two people’s memory. Most teams do. It takes an afternoon and it is out of date by the morning.
Because everything already lives in one project, the answer is just there, and it is current.
Receipts, not vibes
Every acceptance records the person, the time and the reason. Six months later you can still answer why a release went out with a known bug.
Agreed in advance
The bar is set in project settings before the release, not argued about at the end when everyone wants to ship.
Scannable across releases
Each plan carries its verdict, so you can see which release is in trouble without opening any of them.
Understand the verdict, then act on what is blocking it.
The rules-based evaluator computes the readiness verdict. Axon AI reads the latest assessment and explains the conditions, accepted risks, and outstanding work in plain English. From there it can help run the missing checks, investigate failures, draft tests for coverage gaps, or prepare a bug. It does not silently move the bar or make the human release decision.
Who it helps
The same answer, for the three people who need it
The person shipping it
You stop reconstructing the picture from four tabs the night before. The conditions were agreed weeks ago and the answer is already computed.
The person who has to sign it off
You see what is being accepted and by whom before you agree, instead of finding out in the incident review.
Everyone asking on the day
A sentence anyone can read, in a place anyone can look, so the question stops being routed through one person's memory.
Answer it on your own release.
Choose a plan, bring in a release plan, and see where it actually stands.