Release Testing
Release testing is the final round of testing performed on a specific release candidate before it ships — confirming the exact build going to production has been fully verified, often including a full regression pass and a check that all planned exit criteria have genuinely been met.
Release testing differs from ongoing feature testing in scope and focus: it's less about finding new bugs in new functionality and more about final confidence-building — confirming the specific, exact build being shipped (not just "the code," but this precise compiled artifact) behaves correctly end to end.
For teams practicing continuous deployment, formal release testing as a distinct, separate phase largely disappears — its responsibilities get absorbed into the continuous pipeline's automated gates and shift-right practices like canary releases and synthetic monitoring, running constantly rather than as a discrete pre-release event.
