Technical Debt Inventory and Prioritization
Rank debt items by interest and payoff.
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Help me build a technical debt register. Codebase and team: [CODEBASE_AND_TEAM]. Debt items as I describe them (messy list is fine): [RAW_DEBT_NOTES]. Business priorities this quarter: [BUSINESS_PRIORITIES]. Return valid JSON only, an array of objects, one per debt item, with keys: "id", "title", "description", "category" (design, code, test, build, documentation, infrastructure, security), "interest" (what it costs us each week, in plain words and a rough hours-per-month estimate marked as an estimate), "principal" (effort to fix in days, as a range), "risk_if_ignored", "blocks" (array of other ids or features), "score" (a number from 1 to 10 computed as value of fixing divided by effort, with the formula in "score_formula"), "recommended_action" (fix now, fix with related work, schedule, accept), and "owner_suggestion". After the JSON, in plain text, list the top five items to fix this quarter with a one-sentence argument for each that a non-technical manager would accept, and two items to knowingly accept. Do not invent facts about the code; set uncertain fields to null and list the questions needed to fill them.
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[{"id": "TD-03", "title": "Duplicate pricing logic in three services", "category": "design", "interest": "Each price change takes 3 edits and caused 2 billing bugs last quarter (about 6 hours/month, estimate)", "principal": "4-6 days", "risk_if_ignored": "More billing errors", "blocks": ["new discount feature"], "score": 8, "score_formula": "value 8 / effort 1 (scaled)", "recommended_action": "fix with related work", "owner_suggestion": "payments team"}]
Top five this quarter: TD-03 (billing errors), TD-07 (flaky checkout tests wasting 5 hours/week), TD-01, TD-11, TD-05. Accept for now: TD-09 old admin styling.Illustrative only, made-up data. Your results will differ and must be reviewed.