Technical Debt Score · Free · 12 questions

What is technical debt actually costing you?

Every engineering team says they have technical debt. Almost none can put a number on it. Score yours across the four dimensions that turn debt from a complaint into a business case: delivery speed, key-person risk, deployment safety, and system changeability.

Takes about 4 minutes. Answer honestly — the score is only useful if it's true.

The assessment

Rate each statement as it is today — not where you plan to be.

0 of 12 answered

1. Delivery is getting faster, not slower — features that took a month a year ago don't take a quarter now.
2. Estimates hold — teams aren't padding every plan because "you never know what you'll find in that code."
3. No production system depends on a single person — anyone critical could take a month off without a crisis.
4. Our critical systems have automated tests around their core business logic — changes are verified by a safety net, not by hope.
5. Deployments are routine and reversible — nobody schedules releases around one person being available to watch them.
6. Nothing in production runs on end-of-life or unsupported platforms, frameworks, or runtimes.
7. A new engineer can ship a meaningful change to our main systems within their first month.
8. Most defects are caught before customers see them — releases don't routinely break things that used to work.
9. Core business rules live in one place — the same logic isn't re-implemented (differently) across multiple systems and spreadsheets.
10. We could replace a major vendor, integration, or component without a rewrite — systems are coupled by contract, not by accident.
11. Documentation is good enough that questions get answered by reading, not by interrupting the one person who knows.
12. Technical debt is tracked, prioritized, and paid down on a schedule — not deferred until something breaks.