Production readiness is whether a piece of software is actually safe to run with real users, real data, and real payments, not just whether it works when you click through it.
It's not the same as a working demo or a passing manual click-through. Those confirm the happy path works. Production readiness is about everything outside the happy path: what happens when a request fails, when input is malformed, when two things happen at once, when a dependency times out.
In practice it requires: a safe way to deploy and roll back, graceful failure instead of a crash, correct auth and business logic everywhere it applies, a codebase simple enough to change without fear, and structure a new engineer could understand without the original context.
Mati Systems measures this against the PRISM framework: the five questions above turned into a score and a hardening order, rather than a vague impression.
If you can't answer whether it deploys and rolls back safely, fails gracefully, has correct auth and business logic, is simple enough to change, and would make sense to another engineer, you don't yet know if it's production ready. An audit answers all five.
No. Working means it does what you tested. Production ready means it survives what you didn't test: edge cases, failures, and adversarial use, which is a different and much harder bar.
Want to know where your own codebase stands on this?
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