Ally Piechowski: How to Audit a Rails Codebase

Ally Piechowski proposes a set of diagnostic questions for auditing a Rails codebase, organised by audience. Rather than a technical checklist, the questions surface organisational and cultural signals: what people are afraid of, what keeps slipping, and what promises have been quietly abandoned.

For developers: what area are they afraid to touch? When was the last Friday deploy? What broke in production in the last 90 days that tests didn't catch?

For CTOs and engineering managers: what feature has been blocked for over a year? Is there real-time error visibility right now? What was the last feature that took significantly longer than estimated?

For business stakeholders: are there features that got quietly turned off and never came back? Are there things you've stopped promising customers?

The questions function as a quick health scan — the answers reveal where fear, brittleness, and technical debt have accumulated, regardless of what the commit log or test suite says.