technical-debt-assessment

SKILL.md

Technical Debt Assessment

Table of Contents

Overview

When to Use

Quick Start

Reference Guides

Best Practices

Overview

Systematically identify, measure, and manage technical debt to make informed decisions about code quality investments.

When to Use

Legacy code evaluation

Refactoring prioritization

Sprint planning

Code quality initiatives

Acquisition due diligence

Architectural decisions

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

interface DebtItem {
  id: string;
  title: string;
  description: string;
  category: "code" | "architecture" | "test" | "documentation" | "security";
  severity: "low" | "medium" | "high" | "critical";
  effort: number; // hours
  impact: number; // 1-10 scale
  interest: number; // cost per sprint if not fixed
}

class TechnicalDebtAssessment {
  private items: DebtItem[] = [];

  addDebtItem(item: DebtItem): void {
    this.items.push(item);
  }

  calculatePriority(item: DebtItem): number {
    const severityWeight = {
      low: 1,
      medium: 2,
      high: 3,
      critical: 4,
    };
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide
Contents

Technical Debt Calculator
Technical Debt Calculator

Code Quality Scanner
Code Quality Scanner

Best Practices

✅ DO

Quantify debt impact

Prioritize by ROI

Track debt over time

Include debt in sprints

Document debt decisions

Set quality gates

❌ DON'T

Ignore technical debt

Fix everything at once

Skip impact analysis

Make emotional decisions

1d:[