tech-debt-burndown-planner

Purpose

Audit and convert sprawling, informal technical debt complaints into a rigorously prioritized, ROI-driven engineering burndown backlog ranked by Risk, Developer Drag, and Remediation Effort.

When to Use

• Planning engineering allocation for technical debt sprints or quarterly OKRs.
• Convincing product managers to prioritize refactoring by translating tech debt into developer velocity and reliability metrics.
• Establishing an ongoing, sustainable 20% technical debt paydown workflow.

What to Analyze

1. Debt Categorization: Architecture Debt (monolith coupling), Test Debt (flaky E2E tests), Tooling Debt (slow CI builds), Dependency Debt (EOL libraries).
2. Developer Drag Factor (1-5): How many hours per engineer does this issue waste weekly?
3. Production Risk Score (1-5): Likelihood of causing downtime, security breaches, or data loss.
4. Remediation Effort (Story Points / Days): Realistic engineering time required to fix.
5. Payoff ROI Score: (Drag + Risk) / Effort to determine exact sprint ordering.

Output Format

• Prioritized Tech Debt Backlog Table: [Debt Item | Category | Drag | Risk | Effort | ROI Score | Action].
• High-ROI Quick Wins: 1-2 day tasks that yield massive developer velocity improvements.
• Business Justification Narrative: Language for product stakeholders explaining why fixing these items accelerates future feature velocity.

Avoid

• Labeling pure personal aesthetic preferences as "critical tech debt".
• Proposing open-ended multi-month rewrites without incremental milestones.