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FIT

Feature Impact Tool

A tool for analyzing and visualizing the technical debt, development speed, maintenance impact and prioritizing the roadmap of your applications. FIT helps development teams make informed decisions about resource allocation, maintenance priorities, and system optimization by providing quantitative analysis of component complexity, state, and influence on other components.
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What is the Feature Impact Tool (FIT)?

The FIT is a sophisticated analysis tool that models your software system's components and calculates key metrics to help you understand:

  • Technical Debt How much your system deviates from optimal state
  • Maintenance Costs: Resource allocation needed to keep components healthy
  • Development Speed: How technical debt affects your team's velocity
  • Impact Analysis: How changes to components affect the overall system

Why use the FIT?

Data-Driven Decision Making

Make informed decisions, together with all your stakeholders, about:

  • Strategic planning for system improvements
  • Which components to prioritize for refactoring
  • How to allocate maintenance budget effectively
  • The true cost of technical debt on your development speed

Resource Optimization

  • Understand the relationship between component complexity and development speed
  • Optimize budget allocation based on component influence and state

Scenario Planning

  • Model "what-if" scenarios with transactions that change component states
  • Visualize the impact of proposed changes before implementation
  • Track how system health evolves over time with different strategies

System Health Visibility

  • Get a clear overview of your system's current state
  • Identify components that need immediate attention
  • Track weighted averages across your entire system

Key Concepts

Components

The building blocks or functions of your application with three key attributes:

  • Complexity: How complex the component is to work with
  • Fitness (0-10): Current health/quality of the component (8+ is optimal)
  • Influence (0-100%): How much this component affects other parts of the system

Calculations

The tool uses sophisticated algorithms to calculate:

  • System burden: Actual impact considering complexity, fitness deviation from optimal, and influence
  • Speed: How technical debt affects development velocity for this component
  • System burden interest: The "interest" you pay on technical debt
  • Maintenance Cost: Required budget allocation for keeping components healthy

Scenarios & Transactions

Model changes to your system:

  • Create scenarios to explore different strategies
  • Add transactions that modify component attributes
  • See how changes ripple through your entire system
  • Compare before/after states with visual feedback

Who Should Use This?

  • Product owners and managers: Balance feature development with technical health
  • Engineering managers: Make data-driven decisions about technical priorities
  • Technical leads / CTOs: Understand system-wide impact of architectural decisions and get executive-level visibility into technical debt and its business impact