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Is Impact Analysis Performed for Critical Changes?

Type: DeepDive
Category: Release
Audience: Tech leads, architects, SREs, and reviewers overseeing high-risk changes

🔍 What This Perspective Covers

When the change is big, the cost of being wrong explodes.

This perspective checks whether critical or cross-cutting changes are assessed for impact across data, infra, UX, team, and rollback safety.

🔍 Real-World Risk Factors

  • Touches multiple domains or teams
  • Involves data format or schema that affects existing consumers
  • Changes expected latency, consistency, or performance behavior
  • Requires coordination with 3rd parties or downstream systems

⚠️ Failure Patterns

  • Data changes deployed without reverse plan or analytics impact review
  • Infra configuration altered without traffic validation
  • Client behavior breaks due to unnoticed schema or API contract shifts
  • Teams unaware of changes until incident postmortem

✅ Smarter Impact Analysis

  • Use a checklist: who/what does this change affect?
  • Evaluate impact across runtime, deploy, data, ops, support
  • Simulate edge cases and failure scenarios—don’t just test success
  • Involve downstream teams in pre-release validation
  • Classify rollback complexity: safe, partial, irreversible?

🧠 Principle

Scope isn’t just “what we built.”
It’s what could go wrong because we built it.

❓ FAQ

  • Q: Isn’t this just review?
    A: No. Review is what you catch. Impact analysis is what you model.

  • Q: Who owns this?
    A: The person who approves the change must verify that impact was scoped.