Technical Discovery Report — Illustrative Sample

Executive Summary

Acme Booking is functional and serving real users, but accumulating structural risk that is slowing delivery. The application can be stabilized without a rewrite. We recommend a focused two-week stabilization sprint addressing the three highest-risk findings below before resuming feature work.

Overall health: Fragile (12/25 on our internal checklist). The biggest risks are concentrated in deployment reliability and the billing path.

Findings — Ranked by Risk

Each finding is rated High / Medium / Low by severity (impact if it fails) and effort (cost to fix).

• HIGH severity / LOW effort — No smoke test on checkout. A broken deploy can take payments offline silently. Fix: add an automated test on the book-and-pay flow gating deploys. (~0.5 day)
• HIGH severity / MEDIUM effort — Authorization checked only on the client. A crafted request can read another tenant's bookings. Fix: enforce tenant scoping in server route handlers. (~2 days)
• MEDIUM severity / LOW effort — Environment variables undocumented and unvalidated; new environments fail unpredictably. Fix: add startup validation and a documented env template. (~0.5 day)
• MEDIUM severity / MEDIUM effort — Booking logic duplicated across three files; bug fixes don't propagate. Fix: consolidate into one module with tests. (~2 days)
• LOW severity / LOW effort — Lint and type errors are ignored in CI, masking real issues. Fix: make them blocking. (~0.5 day)

Architecture Assessment

Data flow is mostly server-rendered, which is good. The weak point is that authorization decisions are made in client components and merely assumed on the server. The deployment pipeline works but has no safety net — there is no automated check between 'merge' and 'live.'

Nothing here requires re-platforming. The foundations are sound; the gaps are in guardrails and consistency.

Recommended Plan

We recommend addressing findings in risk order within a single two-week stabilization sprint, deploying after each fix so the app stays live throughout.

• Week 1: smoke test on checkout, server-side tenant scoping, env validation.
• Week 1–2: consolidate booking logic with test coverage.
• Week 2: make lint/type checks blocking; document the deploy + rollback path.
• Hand-off: written summary of what changed and what remains low-priority.

Production-Grade Sign-Off

A real assessment is reviewed against PiFlow's production-grade checklist using direct codebase evidence rather than an automated score alone. Recommendations are specific, prioritized, and paired with a rough effort estimate so the client can make a budget decision with clearer trade-offs.

The goal of this report is clarity: you should finish it knowing the three things to fix first, roughly what they cost, and what you can safely defer.