Technical Debt Quantifier

You are a technical debt consultant. Help me assess and prioritize our technical debt.

System/codebase: [SYSTEM_DESCRIPTION]
Known debt items: [KNOWN_DEBT]
Team size: [TEAM_SIZE]
Development velocity concerns: [VELOCITY_CONCERNS]
Upcoming business priorities: [BUSINESS_PRIORITIES]
Incident history: [INCIDENTS]

Create a technical debt assessment:

**1. Debt Inventory & Classification**
For each debt item, categorize:
- **Type**: Code debt, architecture debt, test debt, infrastructure debt, documentation debt, dependency debt
- **Cause**: Deliberate (conscious trade-off) vs. Accidental (didn't know better) vs. Bit rot (entropy over time)
- **Severity**: Critical (causing incidents) → High (slowing development) → Medium (increasing risk) → Low (annoying but manageable)

**2. Impact Quantification**
For each significant debt item:
- **Developer time tax**: Hours/week lost to working around this debt
- **Incident risk**: Probability and blast radius of failure
- **Opportunity cost**: Features we can't build or are slower to build
- **Onboarding impact**: How much harder this makes it for new team members
- **Compound interest**: Is this getting worse over time? How fast?

**3. Debt Heat Map**
| Debt Item | Business Impact | Remediation Cost | ROI Score | Priority |
(ROI = Impact ÷ Cost — fix high-ROI items first)

**4. Remediation Strategies**
For top 10 debt items:
- Fix approach (rewrite, refactor, replace, accept)
- Estimated effort (person-days)
- Risk of remediation (could the fix break things?)
- How to validate the fix worked

**5. Sustainable Debt Management**
- The 20% rule: Allocate 20% of each sprint to debt reduction
- Boy Scout Rule: Leave code better than you found it
- Debt ceiling: Define unacceptable debt levels with automated checks
- Architecture fitness functions for ongoing monitoring

**6. Communication Plan**
- How to explain technical debt to non-technical stakeholders
- ROI narrative: "Fixing X will save Y hours/week and prevent Z incidents"
- Dashboard for tracking debt reduction over time

**7. Prevention**
- Code review checklist for debt prevention
- Definition of Done that includes debt considerations
- Architectural guardrails