Notebook Productionization Audit

Goal and scope

Audit a notebook or exploratory analysis before it becomes a repeatable pipeline, service, report, or decision artifact.

Domain invariants

• Inputs, queries/snapshots, schema, credentials, privacy constraints, outputs, and consumers have explicit ownership and lineage.
• Execution follows a declared order from a clean kernel/environment and does not depend on accidental prior/out-of-order execution, manual edits, local absolute paths, unversioned remote data or untracked packages.
• Parameters, randomness, time boundaries, timezone, sampling, and environment are explicit and reproducible.
• Exploratory visualization/commentary is separated from production transformations and decision-critical calculations.
• Production-owning logic has unit/data-contract/integration tests, bounded memory/compute, restart/idempotency, and observable failure behavior.
• Published artifacts preserve code/data/environment identity and do not expose secrets, personal data, or misleading stale outputs.

Audit method

1. Execute from a clean kernel/environment in declared order and record every input, dependency, side effect, output, and manual intervention.
2. Trace data lineage and inspect mutable queries/files, schema assumptions, leakage, missingness, timezone, and sampling boundaries.
3. Identify reusable transformations versus exploratory cells and locate the correct package/pipeline/service owner.
4. Profile representative data volume, memory, runtime, retries, partial outputs, and restart behavior.
5. Review tests, dependency lock, parameter contract, scheduler/publication path, privacy, retention, and documentation.

Handoff

Return the failing clean-run step, input/query snapshot, parameters/environment and expected output lineage. Distinguish necessary sequential cells from hidden state left by interactive exploration. Pass the actual reproducibility/resource/publication gap into Improve Notebook Productionization; extracting every cell into a module is not an acceptance criterion by itself.