By Andreea Vitan · 2026 · Quality assurance, release readiness and evidence-based go/no-go decisions
The Go/No-Go Mindset is a practical field guide for quality and release work in real software teams, where scope changes, ownership is shared, evidence is incomplete and decisions still have to be made. Its central concern is not process for its own sake, but how teams make credible decisions under uncertainty.
What the book is about
Release decisions are rarely made with perfect information. The useful question is therefore not whether every risk has disappeared, but whether the remaining uncertainty is understood, owned and supported by evidence strong enough for the decision being made.
The book focuses on making risk explicit, keeping decisions traceable and using quality evidence without turning governance into ceremony. It is written around the practical mechanics of release readiness rather than idealised process diagrams.
Who it is for
- QA Leads and Test Managers responsible for release evidence
- Release Managers running readiness and go/no-go decisions
- Technical Delivery Managers coordinating dependencies and risk
- Engineering and product leads who need clearer quality signals
- Teams improving release governance without unnecessary bureaucracy
Topics covered
- Release readiness and go/no-go governance
- Risk-based testing and residual risk
- Quality gates and decision criteria
- Evidence, traceability and ownership
- Dependencies, assumptions and incomplete information
- Defects and release risk
- Practical governance for changing software environments
Published: 2026
Author: Andreea Vitan
Subject: Quality assurance, software testing, release management and release readiness
About the author
Andreea Vitan is a Quality Assurance Engineer, Release Manager and Test Manager with 13+ years of experience across enterprise software, financial services, banking, payments and telecom. Her work focuses on test strategy, QA governance, release readiness, risk, dependencies and evidence-based delivery decisions.
She writes about software quality, release management and technical delivery from a practitioner perspective, with particular interest in the gap between what a process reports and what the underlying delivery state can actually support.