GA Readiness Criteria

This document defines the release-readiness gate for KiCad Studio: the concrete, checkable criteria that must hold before a build is promoted from the preview (beta) channel to the stable 1.x channel on the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX.

KiCad Studio already ships a stable 1.x line (see Versions), so "GA" here is not a one-time 1.0.0 event — it is the standing quality bar applied to every stable promotion. The preview channel described in the Beta Program feeds this gate.

How to use this gate

1. Each criterion below is either met or not met — no partial credit.
2. A stable promotion proceeds only when every criterion is met, or a maintainer records an explicit, time-boxed waiver in the release issue.
3. The gate is re-evaluated for every stable release, not just the first.

Exit criteria

1. Zero open release-blockers

• No open GitHub issue carries the release-blocker label.
• The VS Code canary lanes (minimum, stable, insiders) are green; the minimum lane tracks the engines.vscode floor in the support matrix.

2. CI is green and non-flaky

• All required CI lanes pass on main across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• No required lane has been re-run to recover from a flake in the 7 days before promotion. A flake that recurs resets the clock and is tracked as its own issue until made deterministic.

3. Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) verified

• pnpm test:a11y passes and covers every webview surface.
• A manual screen-reader pass (NVDA or VoiceOver) on the BOM, viewer, and quality-gate views found no unresolved label, role, or heading-order defects.
• Conformance evidence is recorded in Accessibility.

4. Performance budgets met

• Extension activation time, viewer first-render on a large board, BOM render on a large netlist, and memory are within the budgets in Performance Baselines.
• pnpm test:perf passes and fails closed on regression.

5. Internationalization complete

• pnpm run check:nls-parity passes: en/tr key parity holds and no new user-facing string is left untranslated.
• The supported GA locale set (English + Turkish) is documented and current.

6. Security and privacy posture

• CodeQL, Scorecard, secret scanning, and dependency review are green.
• Telemetry and crash reporting remain opt-in and disabled by default, with redaction verified per Telemetry.
• No high or critical advisory is unresolved without a documented waiver.

7. Dependency lifecycle clean

• No security update is pending past its policy window in Dependency Lifecycle.
• Planned major upgrades are either landed or explicitly deferred with a reason.

8. Tester feedback triaged

• Every actionable preview report from the current cycle is triaged into a tracked issue with the source:beta label.
• At least two 2-week preview cycles completed since the previous stable release, per the Beta Program readiness checklist.

9. Documentation current

• User-facing docs (non-generated) reflect the shipping behavior.
• The changelog calls out preview-driven fixes under the relevant product section.
• The marketplace listing, README, and version surfaces tell one coherent story.

Sign-off

A stable promotion is signed off in the release issue with:

• a link to the green CI run on the release commit,
• the checked criteria above (with any waiver and its expiry), and
• the preview-cycle summary that fed the release.