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Release Categorisation

This page is to help service teams decide on the size and scope of a release. Peer approval, via pull request reviews, is required for all releases, and should be considered the default approach for releasing changes to Production. However, some releases may require additional governance and review, depending on their size and impact.

More information can be found in the Release Management Process Guide.

Contact the Release Management team for small, medium, and large releases: CFT_ReleaseMan@justice.gov.uk

Large

  1. SecOps involvement required for the release to proceed (ITHC)
  2. New interfaces with other common components or DTS services or new 3rd Party (Support Model considerations)
  3. This is the first release of a new service / common component (Support Model considerations)

Medium

  1. Altered interfaces with other common components / services / existing 3rd parties
  2. Any infrastructure changes identified or changes to monitoring requiring Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT)
  3. An outage is required for other services
  4. The change affects the use of data, introduces new data, or changes storage needs for data
  5. Performance Testing is required
  6. The change is legislative or requires practice orders/directions
  7. The change impacts multiple code repositories

Small

  1. An outage is required only to your own service
  2. The business feature/change impacts users beyond the boundary of your service
  3. The change affects the Court & Tribunals Service Centre (Implementation Working Group)
  4. If this is a security release, there is a CVE with a risk rating of 9 and above
  5. If the release is a decommissioning of any sort (if requires an impact assessment - could become a Medium)
  6. There are no changes to the support of the service as a result of this release

Peer approval (CI/CD)

  1. The business feature/change only impacts users of your service
  2. The change impacts only one code repository

Release Governance per Category

Release Category Halo Change Request Scheduled in Forward Schedule of Releases Tech Readiness Meeting Detailed Implementation Plan Required Release Management On-Call Support Service Transition Tickets OATs Review QA Report
Large ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Medium ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅
Small ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
Peer Approved (CI/CD) ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌

✅ = Required ❌ = Not Required

This page was last reviewed on 16 July 2026. It needs to be reviewed again on 16 January 2027 by the page owner platops-build-notices .