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.