Acme Corp Change Management Policy

1. Purpose
This document outlines the change management practices at Acme Corp for production systems and customer-facing services.

2. Scope
This policy applies to all changes to production infrastructure, application code, and customer-facing configuration. Changes to non-production environments are out of scope for this policy.

3. Change Request Process
Engineers create a Jira ticket for each proposed change to production. The ticket describes the scope, expected impact, and rollback approach. Where applicable, a GitHub pull request is opened for the code change and linked to the Jira ticket. Pull requests undergo code review by another engineer in the team.

4. Approval
Pull requests receive approval from a peer reviewer before they are merged into the main branch. Major releases are reviewed in our weekly release sync meeting. The engineering lead provides sign-off for high-impact changes during the release window.

5. Testing
Code changes go through automated testing in our CI pipeline. The QA team performs regression testing where applicable. Significant changes are validated in our staging environment prior to production rollout.

6. Deployment
Deployments to production are executed through our deployment pipeline. Each deployment is tracked in the deployment log retained by the release tooling. On-call engineers are notified of changes during release windows.

7. Emergency Changes
For incidents requiring immediate response, the on-call engineer may deploy emergency changes outside the standard process. Post-incident reviews include the change as part of the incident retrospective held the following week.

8. Records
Change records and pull requests are retained for audit purposes.