How to avoid risk of forgetting to release for new version of GitLab ?

Continuing from #3 (comment 190558688)

@tkuah I'm curious to know how we avoid the risk of forgetting to create a new release for auto-build-image before GitLab ships? I know that the secure and verify group have several times run into issues where GitLab version is bumped somewhere and all of a sudden the jobs are failing.