1. Purpose of the gate
Lead customers' workloads run correctly, at the agreed accuracy and performance, on the release candidate software and the production system.
This gate confirms that the product works for real customers on the software that will ship. It is judged customer by customer against criteria agreed in advance, and it feeds the product lifecycle's design-in review.
It also confirms the release candidate passes its tests, so the production release can follow.
Each lead customer's result is reviewed separately, because a product qualified for one deployment is not automatically qualified for another. The review records which deployments are now proven and which still rely on analysis.
Customer feedback gathered during qualification is reviewed for what it says about the product as a whole: missing operators, unclear documentation and usability problems that later customers will meet too. Items not fixed for launch go into the software roadmap with the customer told when to expect them.
Qualification evidence is only as good as the conditions it was gathered under. The review checks that each result names the software version, the system configuration, the data used and the accuracy measure, so that the result can be repeated and compared with later releases.
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