Technical due diligence checklist
50 critical checkpoints across architecture, code quality, security, and team practices. Used by investors and acquirers to evaluate startup engineering maturity.
Architecture review
- System design documentation and diagrams
- Scalability bottlenecks and single points of failure
- Database schema design and migration history
- Infrastructure as code coverage
- Disaster recovery and backup strategy
Code quality
- Test coverage and testing strategy
- CI/CD pipeline maturity
- Technical debt inventory and management
- Code review practices and standards
- Dependency management and update cadence
Security posture
- Authentication and authorization implementation
- Data encryption at rest and in transit
- Vulnerability scanning and patch management
- Incident response plan and runbooks
- Compliance requirements (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA)
Team and process
- Engineering team structure and key-person risk
- Development workflow and release cadence
- On-call rotation and operational maturity
- Documentation currency and completeness
- Hiring pipeline and retention metrics
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