[wtatum]

Having been the target of a Crosslake report a few times it felt like the process was actually almost entirely focused on points like this. Key person risk, talent acquisition pipeline, process maturity, "definition of done", etc. It felt like "hard" tech debt items around code quality, measured SLA performance, etc were present for the sake of completeness but were of almost no consequence to the Crosslake team or those who would read the report.

Does that mirror your experience working in DD?

[iainctduncan]

It's a complex question. First, every diligence has very limited time, so for code and arch diligence, we get enough time to know if it's really good, or really bad. In the middle, you need weeks, not hours.

Second, every client has different priorities, but in general, they want to know what the potential risks are of tanking the investment, and what they need to do to make sure this can't hapen. PE firms aren't like VCs... they don't want a 1 in 10 chance of unicorn, they want a 90% chance of a solid return with zero chance of losing the entire thing. When you're spending $50M to a $1B, a low-but-avoidable risk of disaster is not OK. Finding those is our number one priority. If the code is not awful, then the people, process, and org risks are much more likely to do this.

I'm one of the first to say tech debt kills companies - I've literally seen it. But.... dysfunctional organizations kill companies worse and faster. And those are much easier to sniff out in two days of interviews.

[fisf]

There is a reason for that. Tech debt, code quality, poor SLA metrics are symptoms, and proxies for various things (that can be fixed).

Failures in the other areas are root causes and more fundamental issues.