The 50-Item Checklist
Organized in 5 categories: Architecture (10 items): scalability, modularity, dependency management, API design, database architecture, caching strategy, message queue design, service mesh, deployment architecture, monitoring stack.
Code Quality (10 items): test coverage, CI/CD maturity, documentation, code review practices, static analysis results, dependency freshness, security scan history, technical debt inventory, performance benchmarks, accessibility compliance.
Team (10 items): org structure, key person dependencies, tenure distribution, hiring pipeline, compensation benchmarks, remote/hybrid policy, engineering culture assessment, management layers, on-call practices, training investment.
Operations (10 items): uptime history, incident response, disaster recovery, backup verification, compliance status, vendor contracts, license audit, infrastructure costs, deployment frequency, change failure rate.
Economics (10 items): R&D as % of revenue, innovation ratio, cost per feature, technical debt exposure, AI unit economics, cloud optimization level, FinOps maturity, engineering efficiency trends, revenue per engineer, cost of delay.