Explain Technical Debt
Forward your code quality report or describe legacy system issues; get a business-language risk summary with cost projections for leadership.
I need to present to the board next week about why we need $180K to refactor the billing system. Can you turn this into something that will resonate with non-technical board members?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
On Friday, March 7, 2026, Kai Rosen kai.rosen@northpointlabs.io wrote:
Here is the quarterly code health summary for our billing service:
SonarQube Metrics (billing-service repo):
Code smells: 847 (up from 612 last quarter)
Bugs: 23 critical, 41 major
Vulnerabilities: 8 (3 rated high)
Technical debt ratio: 14.2% (was 9.8% six months ago)
Test coverage: 34% (down from 41%)
Duplicated lines: 18.7%
What the numbers do not show:
Our billing service is a 6-year-old monolith that started as a quick prototype and never got rewritten. Three of the original developers have left and nobody fully understands the payment reconciliation module. Deployments that used to take 20 minutes now take 3 hours because we have to manually verify billing calculations after each push. We had 7 billing-related incidents last quarter, up from 2 the quarter before. Two caused delayed invoices to 200+ customers. The team is spending roughly 30% of sprint capacity on just keeping it running instead of building new features. Our two best engineers have mentioned it as a reason they are considering other opportunities.
Kai
---------- Forwarded message ----------
On Friday, March 7, 2026, Kai Rosen kai.rosen@northpointlabs.io wrote:
Here is the quarterly code health summary for our billing service:
SonarQube Metrics (billing-service repo):
Code smells: 847 (up from 612 last quarter)
Bugs: 23 critical, 41 major
Vulnerabilities: 8 (3 rated high)
Technical debt ratio: 14.2% (was 9.8% six months ago)
Test coverage: 34% (down from 41%)
Duplicated lines: 18.7%
What the numbers do not show:
Our billing service is a 6-year-old monolith that started as a quick prototype and never got rewritten. Three of the original developers have left and nobody fully understands the payment reconciliation module. Deployments that used to take 20 minutes now take 3 hours because we have to manually verify billing calculations after each push. We had 7 billing-related incidents last quarter, up from 2 the quarter before. Two caused delayed invoices to 200+ customers. The team is spending roughly 30% of sprint capacity on just keeping it running instead of building new features. Our two best engineers have mentioned it as a reason they are considering other opportunities.
Kai
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