Release Process

We follow a two-week release cadence with feature freezes on the Thursday before release. Each release goes through the following stages.

Feature development happens on feature branches merged to `main` via PRs. On feature freeze day, a release branch is cut from main. Only bug fixes are allowed on the release branch during the freeze period. QA performs regression testing on the staging environment built from the release branch.

On release day, the release branch is tagged and deployed to production. Post-deployment, the team monitors error rates and performance metrics for 2 hours. If metrics are stable, the release is declared successful and the release branch is merged back to main.