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skills/software/maintenance-technical-debt.md

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+# Maintenance and Technical Debt Planning
+
+## Purpose
+
+Turn vague maintenance needs into a practical, sequenced plan that improves delivery speed, reliability, and future change safety over time.
+
+## When to use
+
+- The codebase has accumulated risky or slowing debt
+- A team needs to prioritize cleanup against feature work
+- Repeated friction suggests structural maintenance investment is overdue
+- You need to explain why maintenance work matters in product terms
+
+## Inputs to gather
+
+- Known pain points, repeated failures, and slow areas in delivery
+- Architectural hotspots, obsolete patterns, and fragile dependencies
+- Team constraints, roadmap pressure, and acceptable disruption
+- Evidence of cost: incidents, churn, slowed feature work, or support burden
+
+## How to work
+
+- Focus on debt that materially changes future delivery, reliability, or risk.
+- Group issues into themes rather than a flat list of annoyances.
+- Prioritize by impact, urgency, and dependency relationships.
+- Prefer incremental sequences that can ship safely between feature work.
+- Translate maintenance value into outcomes the team can defend.
+
+## Output expectations
+
+- Prioritized maintenance plan or backlog proposal
+- Clear rationale for what should happen now versus later
+- Sequencing guidance and expected payoff
+
+## Quality checklist
+
+- Recommendations are tied to real delivery or reliability pain.
+- Prioritization is explicit and defensible.
+- The plan is incremental enough to execute.
+- Work is framed in terms of reduced risk or increased velocity, not vague cleanliness.
+
+## Handoff notes
+
+- Note what evidence would strengthen or change the prioritization.
+- Pair with roadmap and opportunity prioritization when balancing debt against new initiatives.