Optimization Pattern — Checklist

Pattern: Optimization
Component: checklist.md
Version: 1.1 | Updated: 2026-07-16

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Gate: Do not promote the flag to 100% until every item is checked or waived with a named owner and expiry.

Intake

• Target metric and owner named
• Minimum useful effect size written
• Guardrails and abort criteria pre-declared (not renegotiated mid-canary)
• Workload ID frozen and checked in
• Kill-switch feature flag exists and is tested disableable

Evidence

• Baseline includes warm-up, sample count, p50/p95/p99, and timestamp
• Dominant cost attributed (≥30% or explicit stop)
• Exactly one hypothesis in scope
• Candidate vs control under identical workload ID
• Confidence interval or noise band stated
• Correctness oracle ran with zero failures
• Unit cost measured end-to-end when cost is in scope
• Shifted bottleneck inspected after the change

Canary & promotion

• Progressive stages defined (e.g. 1% → 5% → 25%)
• Abort watcher named and on-call aware
• No concurrent conflicting optimizations on the same path
• Human recorded KEEP/KILL/REVISE with date
• If KEEP: capacity headroom documented

Aftercare

• Flag default updated only after soak window
• Dashboards/alerts updated for new saturation shape if needed
• Failed hypotheses recorded so the team does not retry blindly