# How to Prepare Your Codebase for Technical Due Diligence > Learn how to prepare your codebase for technical due diligence before a funding round or acquisition. Covers documentation, debt, security, and repo hygiene. - **Published:** 2025-03-01 - **Author:** Clixo - **Reading time:** 6 min read - **Tags:** technical-due-diligence, codebase-audit, startups, fundraising - **Canonical URL:** https://clixo.sh/blog/how-to-prepare-codebase-for-technical-due-diligence Investors and acquirers now routinely send a technical reviewer to look at your code before they close a deal. Most founders discover this too late — after they have committed to a timeline — and end up scrambling to clean up years of accumulated shortcuts in a matter of weeks. Getting ahead of this process is not about hiding problems; it is about presenting your codebase in a way that surfaces honest risks alongside honest strengths. This guide walks through the specific steps to prepare your codebase for technical due diligence, whether you are heading into a Series A, a strategic acquisition, or a secondary transaction. ## What Technical Due Diligence Actually Covers Before you prepare, you need to know what reviewers look for. A standard technical due diligence engagement covers: - **Architecture and system design** — Is the system decomposed sensibly? Are there obvious single points of failure? - **Code quality and maintainability** — Is the code readable, tested, and consistently structured? - **Technical debt** — How much of the team's capacity is consumed by maintenance and firefighting? - **Security posture** — Are there known vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, or missing controls? - **Infrastructure and deployment** — How does the team ship? Is there CI/CD? Is infra defined as code? - **IP and licensing** — Do you own your code? Are open-source licenses compatible with commercial use? - **Team capability** — Can the existing team execute the post-deal roadmap without key-person risk? Reviewers are not expecting perfection. They are assessing whether the risks are known, manageable, and priced into the deal correctly. ```mermaid flowchart TD A["Step 1: Audit repository"] --> B["Step 2: Document architecture and code"] B --> C["Step 3: Make tech debt visible and bounded"] C --> D["Step 4: Clean repo hygiene"] D --> E["Step 5: Prepare team for assessment"] E --> F["Ready for technical due diligence"] ``` ## Step 1: Audit Your Repository Before Anyone Else Does Run your own internal audit first. The goal is to identify and document issues before a third party finds them without context. Start with automated scans: - Run a static analysis tool (ESLint, SonarQube, Semgrep, or equivalents for your stack) and export the report. - Run a dependency vulnerability scan (`npm audit`, `snyk test`, `pip-audit`, or similar). - Scan for accidentally committed secrets using a tool like `truffleHog` or `gitleaks`. For each category of finding, write a short paragraph explaining what it is, why it exists, and what the remediation plan looks like. This narrative turns raw scan output into evidence of a mature engineering team, not evidence of a negligent one. ### Prioritize Critical and High Findings You cannot fix everything before a review. Prioritize: 1. Any exposed credentials or secrets in version control history — rotate these immediately. 2. Critical and high-severity dependency vulnerabilities with known exploits. 3. Authentication or authorization logic that has never been reviewed externally. Leave medium and low findings documented with planned remediation dates. Reviewers respect triage; they distrust pretense. ## Step 2: Document What the Code Does Missing or outdated documentation is one of the most consistent red flags reviewers note. You do not need a wiki for everything — you need clarity on the critical paths. Write or update the following: - A `README.md` in every service or repository that explains what the service does, how to run it locally, and how to deploy it. - An architecture diagram showing how your services communicate, what databases they use, and what third-party integrations exist. - A data flow diagram if you handle personally identifiable information (PII) or payment data. - A runbook for your most common operational tasks (deployments, rollbacks, database migrations). If your architecture has evolved significantly, document the current state — not the aspirational future state. ## Step 3: Make Technical Debt Visible and Bounded Reviewers will find your technical debt. The question is whether they find it as a surprise or as a managed known quantity. Create a simple technical debt register. A spreadsheet or a set of tagged GitHub issues works fine. For each item note: - What the debt is (e.g., "authentication service does not support MFA") - Why it was incurred (speed, team size, early pivot) - What the estimated effort to remediate is - Whether it blocks any post-deal initiative A bounded, documented debt register signals a team that makes deliberate engineering decisions. An unbounded, undocumented mess signals a team that has lost control of its own codebase. ## Step 4: Clean Up Repository Hygiene Simple hygiene issues can unfairly color a reviewer's first impression. Before the review: - Remove unused branches (or at least trunk-protect the main branch). - Ensure commit history is meaningful — not a wall of "fix" and "wip" messages. - Confirm that your CI pipeline passes cleanly on the main branch. - Remove any commented-out code blocks that are more than a few weeks old. - Check that environment-specific configuration is stored outside the codebase (environment variables, secrets manager — not `.env` files checked in). ## Step 5: Prepare for the Team Assessment Technical due diligence almost always includes conversations with engineering leads, not just a code review. Prepare your team to speak clearly about: - Why certain architectural decisions were made and what the trade-offs are. - What the on-call and incident response process looks like. - How new engineers get up to speed (onboarding documentation matters here). - What the deployment frequency and rollback process are. Coaches do not help here. Reviewers can tell when an engineer is reciting a prepared script versus speaking from direct experience. ## How Clixo Can Help Clixo runs independent technical due diligence assessments for investors and pre-DD readiness reviews for founders. Both engagements follow a structured methodology covering code quality, architecture, security, and team capability — with a plain-language report that is useful for deal teams and engineering leads alike. If you are preparing for a round or an acquisition and want an honest read before the formal process starts, [reach out to start a conversation](https://clixo.sh/#contact). --- Clixo · 1141 W Bryn Mawr Ave, Itasca, IL 60143, US · [hello@clixo.sh](mailto:hello@clixo.sh) [Start a build](https://clixo.sh/#contact) · [All services](https://clixo.sh/services) · [Agent guide (llms.txt)](https://clixo.sh/llms.txt)