Annual Technical Debt Review

Once a year a senior engineer reads the application as a whole and writes down what is accumulating against you: the parts most likely to break, the dependencies and runtimes running out of supported life, and the work that gets more expensive the longer it waits. If you have inherited an application and nobody can tell you how bad it is, this is the service that answers that before you spend money on the wrong repair.

What you get

• A written assessment of one codebase, with risk hotspots ranked by what breaks and what that costs you
• An upgrade runway: which runtimes, languages and major dependencies fall out of support, and when
• A finding on whether the application can be tested, deployed and recovered at all, which is usually the one that matters most
• A remediation roadmap costed against the services on this list, so you can buy it in pieces instead of all at once
• A call to go through it with whoever makes the spending decision

What this does not cover

• Doing the work it recommends. This is the assessment; the remediation is bought separately, and the roadmap prices it so the choice is yours.
• A guarantee that every number in the roadmap holds. Anything we can price against a published service here is priced exactly; anything larger is given as a range and scoped properly before you commit to it.
• A line-by-line read. This works at the level of structure and risk — one module examined in detail is a Code Review Session.
• Security assurance for an auditor or an insurer. That is the Annual Security Posture Review, or an external penetration test, both under Security and risk.

Who it fits

Anyone who has to decide what to do with an inherited application — keep it, repair it, or replace it — and currently has no basis for the decision. Buy it before a Web Application Build Sprint rather than after: $560 of assessment regularly shows the $980 sprint was aimed at the wrong thing.