CIOPages
⚙️Interactive Checklist

Technical Debt Assessment Checklist

Identify and prioritize technical debt across your technology portfolio.

20 items0%

Critical items (marked ★) carry higher weight. Start with Discovery & Cataloging — you cannot remediate debt you have not identified and quantified.

Discovery & Cataloging

Identify and document technical debt across the technology portfolio.

0/5
A technical debt inventory exists that catalogs known debt items across applications, infrastructure, and data.★ Critical
1.1
Static code analysis tools are used to identify code-level debt (complexity, duplication, code smells).
1.2
Dependency scanning identifies outdated libraries, unsupported frameworks, and end-of-life components.
1.3
Architecture debt is documented, including tightly coupled systems, missing abstractions, and scaling bottlenecks.
1.4
Documentation debt is tracked, including undocumented APIs, missing runbooks, and outdated architecture diagrams.
1.5

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
2.1
Engineering velocity impact is measured (e.g., increased cycle time, incident frequency, onboarding time).
2.2
Security risk from technical debt (e.g., unpatched dependencies, legacy authentication) is assessed.★ Critical
2.3
Operational cost of debt is estimated (e.g., additional support burden, manual workarounds, incident toil).
2.4
Debt items are linked to the systems and teams they affect to enable ownership-based remediation.
2.5

Prioritization

Rank debt items to focus remediation on the highest-value opportunities.

0/5
A prioritization framework scores debt by business impact, remediation effort, and risk severity.
3.1
Critical debt items blocking strategic initiatives (e.g., cloud migration, API enablement) are escalated.
3.2
Quick wins (high impact, low effort) are identified and scheduled for near-term remediation.
3.3
Technical debt is visible in product and engineering backlogs alongside feature work.★ Critical
3.4
Debt prioritization is reviewed quarterly and adjusted based on changing business priorities.
3.5

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.
4.1
Remediation targets are set with measurable KPIs (e.g., reduce critical debt items by 30% per quarter).
4.2
Guardrails are in place to prevent new debt accumulation (e.g., code quality gates, architecture review boards).
4.3
Technical debt metrics are reported to engineering and business leadership at least quarterly.
4.4
A debt prevention culture is fostered through retrospectives, blameless reviews, and design standards.
4.5
In the CIO Intelligence Suite

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