Due Diligence Report: Technical Debt & Engineering Velocity Risk
Pricing the debt that does not show up on a bug tracker, before it shows up as an outage.
Executive Summary
This review assessed whether the organization's feature velocity was being sustained through genuine efficiency or through unpriced technical debt accumulation.
Findings
Core transaction latency had crept upward by a small, consistent margin per release over the prior two quarters, with no single release flagged as the cause.
Recommendation: Add latency regression budgets to release sign-off criteria, not just functional regression testing.
No formal threshold existed for when accumulated technical debt required dedicated repayment time before further feature work.
Recommendation: Establish a written covenant defining the debt threshold that triggers mandatory repayment sprints.
Engineering velocity was measured purely by feature throughput, with no corresponding structural health metric tracked alongside it.
Recommendation: Pair feature throughput metrics with a structural health indicator, reviewed at the same cadence.
Conclusion
The organization's velocity is currently sustainable, but the absence of a repayment covenant means that sustainability is not actively managed, it is incidental. A written threshold would convert this from a latent risk into a managed one.
Frequently Asked
How can technical debt be a risk if velocity is still high?
Velocity measured purely by feature throughput can mask structural drift, such as gradually increasing latency, that only becomes visible once it causes an outage.