A weekly release and a continuous pipeline are tested against the same 53 items. The question a faster team asks is how that is possible without the checklist becoming the bottleneck. The answer is in the how column.
Three kinds of how
Each checklist item is marked manual, automated, or tool. Automated items (secrets scan, RLS (row-level security: database rules that decide which rows each signed-in user may read or write) flag query, direct calls to actions, webhook (a message a provider such as Stripe sends to your server when something happens, like a payment) negative cases, fault injection (making a dependency fail on purpose in staging to see what the user and the logs show)) run in CI (the pipeline that builds and tests every change before it can be merged or deployed) on every candidate build and produce their part of the record without anyone waiting. Tool items (k6 smoke, device matrix) run on a schedule that matches the cadence. Manual items (reading policies, replaying auth flows out of order, checking the credential inventory) are run by a person.
At weekly cadence, a person runs the manual items on each release. At daily cadence, the manual items are run on the releases that touch the relevant area, and the record says which. At continuous cadence, the manual items become a daily pass over what shipped, and the automated items are the gate.
What the plan limits describe
The plans page shows releases per week (2, 10, continuous within scope), flows automated by month 2 (30, 80, 200), and environments (1, 2, 3). Those numbers are the cadence translated into work: more releases need more of the checklist automated, and more automation needs more flows in the suite and more environments to run them against.
They are also limits, not targets. A Starter team that starts releasing daily has outgrown Starter; the limits table makes that visible before it becomes a conversation.
The item that changes most with cadence
DR-05, the release record, is a low-severity item and the one that changes most. At weekly cadence a record is a document. At continuous cadence it is a line per deploy with the build hash, the checklist version and the verdict (a one-word release result (pass, pass with findings, fail) with the findings and the checklist version behind it), generated by the pipeline and signed by the person who ran the manual pass that day. A questionnaire reviewer, an investor or a new engineer can read either.
What does not change
The pass criteria. AC-02's criterion is zero rows on a foreign select and a permission error on foreign writes, on every table, whether the release is one of two this week or one of forty. Speed changes who runs the test and when, never what counts as passing.
Compare the three plans side by side, or read how a release run works.