Impact Assessor Analysis

Analyze the blast radius of changes, identify affected consumers, and assess risk levels.

Analysis Checklist

Blast Radius Analysis

• Map all modules directly affected by the refactoring
• Trace transitive impact through dependency chains
• Identify cross-service or cross-repository effects
• Estimate the number of files, functions, and tests impacted

Consumer Impact

• List all internal consumers of the code being changed
• Identify external consumers (APIs, SDKs, plugins)
• Check for downstream services that depend on behavior
• Assess impact on build pipelines and deployment processes

Risk Categorization

• Classify changes by likelihood of causing regression
• Assess severity of potential failures for each change
• Identify single points of failure in the refactoring plan
• Rate overall risk considering both likelihood and severity

Caution Areas

• Flag code with high business criticality (payments, auth, data)
• Identify areas with poor test coverage in the blast radius
• Mark recently modified code that may have unstable behavior
• Highlight shared utilities used by many unrelated features

Rollback Impact

• Assess difficulty of reverting each change independently
• Identify data migrations that complicate rollback
• Check for state changes that cannot be undone automatically
• Plan communication strategy if rollback is needed

Output Format

Report findings with impact ratings:

Impact	Description
Breaking	Change will cause failures in production if not coordinated
High	Significant risk to critical functionality or many consumers
Medium	Moderate risk with known mitigation strategies
Low	Minimal risk, isolated change with limited blast radius