Strategic Technology Assessment: NovaTech Solutions

Prepared for: CTO and Board Technology Committee Assessment date: 2026-03-15 Scope: Full-stack product engineering, infrastructure, and data platform

Executive Summary

NovaTech's technology organization is operationally functional but architecturally fragile. The core product runs on a Django monolith deployed via manual SSH scripts — there is no CI/CD pipeline, no automated testing, and deployment frequency has dropped from weekly to monthly over the past year due to fear of regression. The most urgent investment is a basic deployment pipeline (Phase 1, 4-6 weeks) which would unblock all downstream improvements. The estimated annual cost of technical debt across the three highest-severity items is $380K-$520K in lost engineering velocity.

Health Scorecard

| System | Deploy Freq. | Incident Rate | MTTR | Dependency Currency | Health Score | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Core Product (Django) | Monthly | Medium (3/mo) | 4-8 hours | Behind (Django 3.2, EOL) | Degraded | | Data Pipeline (Airflow) | N/A | Low | Hours | Current | Adequate | | Customer Portal (React) | Weekly | Low | <1 hour | Current | Strong |

Gap Analysis

| Gap | Category | Business Impact | Cost of Inaction (12 mo.) | |---|---|---|---| | No CI/CD pipeline | Infrastructure | High — every deploy is a manual risk | $180K in engineer time on manual deploys | | No automated tests | Process | High — regression fear slows delivery | $120K in bug-fix rework | | Django 3.2 EOL | Infrastructure | Medium — security patches unavailable | Unquantified security exposure |

Phase 1: Stabilize (0-90 days)

| Initiative | Effort | Success Criteria | |---|---|---| | Deploy GitHub Actions CI/CD | Medium (3-4 weeks) | Every merge to main auto-deploys to staging | | Add critical-path test coverage | Medium (4-6 weeks) | 40% coverage on checkout and auth flows | | Upgrade Django 3.2 → 5.0 | Large (6-8 weeks) | All tests pass on Django 5.0; staging verified |