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Activity

Technical debt assessment

Evaluate and prioritize technical debt in your codebase

Conduct a systematic assessment of technical debt to make informed decisions about where to invest refactoring efforts. This activity helps balance technical excellence with business priorities.

60 minutes
analysis

Overview

Conduct a systematic assessment of technical debt to make informed decisions about where to invest refactoring efforts. This activity helps balance technical excellence with business priorities.

Learning objectives

  • Identify and categorize technical debt
  • Assess business and technical impact
  • Create a prioritized remediation plan

Instructions

Perform a technical debt assessment:

1. Identify areas of technical debt in your system 2. Categorize by type (architecture, testing, documentation, etc.) 3. Assess impact on development velocity and risk 4. Calculate rough ROI for addressing each item 5. Create a prioritized backlog

Steps

1

Debt identification

25 minutes

Survey codebase and gather team input

2

Impact analysis

20 minutes

Evaluate business and technical consequences

3

Prioritization

15 minutes

Rank items and create action plan

Pro tips

  • •Involve the whole team in identification
  • •Consider both short and long-term impacts
  • •Communicate findings to stakeholders

Example outcome

A prioritized list of 5-10 technical debt items with impact assessments and remediation estimates

Explore more resources

Check out the full stdlib collection for more frameworks, templates, and guides to accelerate your technical leadership journey.