Measure the cost and risk of a codebase before it becomes a roadmap surprise.
Direct answer
A technical debt assessment evaluates how much hidden engineering drag exists in a repository, where it sits, how risky it is, and what work should be prioritized to reduce outages, slowdown, and rewrite pressure.
A strong assessment makes technical debt visible in places teams usually miss: maintainability drift, security exposure, brittle architecture, outdated dependencies, and modules that absorb most incident or change risk.
Leaders need more than a list of warnings. They need a ranked backlog, impact framing, and evidence for why specific debt items affect roadmap speed, incident frequency, or modernization cost.
LegacyCode MRI frames technical debt as a repository health problem. Instead of treating every issue equally, it prioritizes the work that is most likely to reduce fragility and accelerate future delivery.