⚙️Interactive Checklist
Technical Debt Assessment Checklist
Identify and prioritise technical debt across your technology portfolio.
20 items0%
Critical items (marked ★) carry higher weight. Start with Discovery & Cataloguing — you cannot remediate debt you have not identified and quantified.
Discovery & Cataloguing
Identify and document technical debt across the technology portfolio.
0/5
A technical debt inventory exists that catalogues known debt items across applications, infrastructure, and data.★ Critical
Static code analysis tools are used to identify code-level debt (complexity, duplication, code smells).
Dependency scanning identifies outdated libraries, unsupported frameworks, and end-of-life components.
Architecture debt is documented, including tightly coupled systems, missing abstractions, and scaling bottlenecks.
Documentation debt is tracked, including undocumented APIs, missing runbooks, and outdated architecture diagrams.
Impact Assessment
Quantify the business and engineering impact of accumulated debt.
0/5
Each debt item is assessed for business impact (e.g., customer experience, revenue risk, compliance exposure).★ Critical
Engineering velocity impact is measured (e.g., increased cycle time, incident frequency, onboarding time).
Security risk from technical debt (e.g., unpatched dependencies, legacy authentication) is assessed.★ Critical
Operational cost of debt is estimated (e.g., additional support burden, manual workarounds, incident toil).
Debt items are linked to the systems and teams they affect to enable ownership-based remediation.
Prioritisation
Rank debt items to focus remediation on the highest-value opportunities.
0/5
A prioritisation framework scores debt by business impact, remediation effort, and risk severity.
Critical debt items blocking strategic initiatives (e.g., cloud migration, API enablement) are escalated.
Quick wins (high impact, low effort) are identified and scheduled for near-term remediation.
Technical debt is visible in product and engineering backlogs alongside feature work.★ Critical
Debt prioritisation is reviewed quarterly and adjusted based on changing business priorities.
Remediation Planning
Plan and govern the systematic reduction of technical debt.
0/5
A dedicated capacity allocation (e.g., 15–20% of engineering capacity) is reserved for debt remediation.
Remediation targets are set with measurable KPIs (e.g., reduce critical debt items by 30% per quarter).
Guardrails are in place to prevent new debt accumulation (e.g., code quality gates, architecture review boards).
Technical debt metrics are reported to engineering and business leadership at least quarterly.
A debt prevention culture is fostered through retrospectives, blameless reviews, and design standards.