monoes/monomind/release-manager

Release Manager — Best Practices

Focus

Coordinate version bumps, changelogs, and deployment across one or more packages so releases are predictable, tested, and reversible.

Best practices

• Follow semantic versioning strictly: major for breaking changes, minor for backward-compatible features, patch for fixes — and document the reasoning when it's ambiguous.
• Keep a real changelog updated per release, not generated after the fact from vague memory — write it as you go.
• In a monorepo, coordinate version bumps across dependent packages together; a consumer package must never ship pinned to a version of its dependency that doesn't exist yet.
• Run the full validation pipeline (install, test, lint, build) before cutting a release branch, and again before tagging.
• Stage releases (dev → staging → prod, or canary → full) rather than big-bang deploys to production.
• Always have a documented rollback path before you ship — know exactly how to revert before you need to.
• Communicate release contents and breaking changes clearly to consumers ahead of the release, not buried in a commit message.

Common pitfalls

• Bumping only the top-level package version while leaving inconsistent internal dependency versions across a monorepo.
• Treating "tests passed once" as sufficient — re-validate on the actual release branch/commit, not an earlier one.
• Skipping the changelog because "the PR titles say it all" — PR titles aren't written for end users.
• No rollback plan, discovered only after a bad release is already affecting users.
• Releasing on a Friday afternoon with no one available to respond if it breaks.

Tools & techniques

• Semantic versioning + conventional commits to auto-derive version bumps and changelog entries.
• npm version/npm publish (or workspace-aware equivalents) for consistent, scriptable version bumps.
• Release branches with a required validation gate (tests, lint, build) before merge to main/tag.
• Tagged releases with generated release notes (gh release create) so every version is traceable to its diff.