Architecture assessment for Angular and Nx
Technical debt does not announce itself. It sends the bill later.
Industry leading experts read your Angular or Nx codebase from the outside, rank every finding by what it costs you, and hand you a roadmap your own team can execute. Fixed scope, two to three weeks.
What the numbers say about a codebase left alone
None of these figures come from us. They describe the average team, and the average team believes its own situation is better than average.
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42%
of developer time is spent on maintenance issues such as debugging, refactoring and dealing with bad code.
Stripe, The Developer Coefficient
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10–20%
of the technology budget meant for new products is diverted to resolving problems related to technical debt.
McKinsey, Tech debt: reclaiming tech equity
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20–40%
of the value of a company's entire technology estate is technical debt, by the estimate of the CIOs McKinsey surveyed. Most of them could not say where in the code it sat.
McKinsey, Tech debt: reclaiming tech equity
Take a team of eight at a fully loaded cost of ninety thousand euro per engineer. Forty-two percent of their time is over three hundred thousand euro a year that buys no new features. That money is spent whether you measure it or not. The only question is whether you know where it goes.
Roberto from Heckers Software joined our team. Not by immediately bulldozing through the code, but by carefully and thoughtfully paving the right paths with insight and calm.
Peter Nieuwenhuyse Software architect & Angular coach Fourteen signs your architecture is quietly costing you
Every one of these is something we have found in a codebase whose owners thought it was fine. Tick the ones that are true for yours.
What we have learned reading other people's code
Years of assessing Angular and Nx codebases for enterprises come down to four observations. They are yours to use, with or without us.
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The people inside cannot see it, and it is not their fault.
A codebase changes one pull request at a time, and every one of those steps was reasonable. The result is not. Familiarity hides structure: you stop seeing the workaround the way you stop seeing the crack in your own wall. That is why the most experienced developer on the team is often the least able to describe what is wrong with it.
Do this today. Ask the developer who joined most recently which parts of the app they avoid touching, and why. Write the answers down without arguing. That list is your first finding.
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Architecture decays in a fixed order.
First the boundaries blur: an import that should not have been allowed. Then ownership blurs: nobody knows who owns the shared library. Then knowledge concentrates in one or two people. Only then does velocity drop, and only after that does quality. Most teams notice at step four and treat step five.
Do this today. Open your project graph (nx graph, or draw it by hand) and count the arrows pointing at your shared library. If more than half of everything depends on it, you are past step one.
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A rewrite is the most expensive way to learn what your current code already knows.
Every rewrite we have been asked to assess re-implemented the same domain rules and rediscovered the same edge cases in its second year. Restructuring in place inside an Nx workspace almost always wins, because releases keep shipping while the structure improves.
Do this today. Before any rewrite discussion, list the ten business rules only the old code knows. If nobody can write that list, you are not ready to replace it.
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A ranked list beats a long one.
A sixty-page report of everything that is wrong is a way to change nothing. What moves a team is the five findings that cost the most, with the fix and the effort next to each. Ranking is the hard part, and it is the part most reviews skip.
Do this today. Whatever you find, sort it by what it costs per month, not by how ugly it looks. The ugliest code is rarely the most expensive.
No task was too difficult for Roberto. He knows Angular very well, and I would highly recommend him for your Angular project.
Nico Vandenbroucke IT-Directeur, Wit-Gele Kruis West-Vlaanderen How the assessment runs
Fixed scope, fixed duration, and nothing that takes your team out of their sprint for more than a few hours in total.
What you receive
- A written report with every finding ranked by impact, each with the concrete fix and an effort estimate
- A dependency and boundary map of your workspace, with the violations marked
- An upgrade path for your Angular and Nx versions
- A roadmap agreed with your team, sized to your capacity and release calendar
- The recorded roadmap session, so people who were not in the room get the same story
- Thirty days of follow-up questions while you start executing
Roberto delivers quickly, makes well-considered decisions, and actively contributes to architectural discussions. I can strongly recommend him as a full-stack developer.
Ferdi Havenaar Manager IT Web & App, Vattenfall 
No obligation. A short call to see whether we are the right fit.
Three ways to do this
Pick by how much certainty you need. The assessment itself is a fixed price you see here; only hands-on execution is quoted, once we know the size of the work.
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Minimum
The least any team running Angular in production should do once a year.
One week
€4,900 fixed, excl. VAT
A structural scan of the workspace: enough to know where you stand and what to do first.
- Project graph, dependency and boundary analysis
- Bundle size and build time analysis
- The ten findings that cost you most, ranked, each with its fix
- A 60-minute walkthrough with your lead developers
- Interviews with your developers and product owners
- Roadmap session and estimates
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Standard
Most teams choose this
For teams that want the full picture and a plan they can run themselves.
Two to three weeks
€12,900 fixed, excl. VAT
The complete assessment: code, workflows and people, with a ranked report and a roadmap built together with your team.
- Everything in Minimum
- Interviews with developers, leads and product
- Testing strategy: what is tested at which level, what is missing, and what the gaps cost you
- Nx setup: affected commands, caching and Nx Cloud, so builds and CI only run what changed
- Full written report: every finding ranked by impact, with fix and effort
- Roadmap session with your team, sized to your capacity
- Upgrade path for Angular and Nx versions
- Thirty days of follow-up questions
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Advanced
For teams that want the highest-impact fixes done, not just found.
Three weeks, then execution in sprints
On quote Standard at €12,900, execution priced after the roadmap
The Standard assessment, followed by hands-on execution of the top findings with your developers.
- Everything in Standard
- We implement the top findings, or pair with your developers on them
- Module boundaries enforced in lint and in the build
- Review of the first pull requests after the roadmap
- Monthly check-in for one quarter
Minimum and Standard are fixed prices, excl. VAT, for workspaces up to roughly fifty projects; larger workspaces get a fixed quote after a thirty-minute call. The number does not change during the assessment. Advanced adds execution in sprints, quoted after the roadmap.
From the people we have worked with
Every engagement is led by founder Roberto Heckers. These are the words of people who worked with him.
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Roberto’s knowledge of Angular is exceptionally deep. It’s clear in everything he does that he understands exactly what is happening and why.
Ferdi Havenaar Manager IT Web & App, Vattenfall -
Many of the choices Roberto made when he joined still contribute today to the stability and quality of the project.
Peter Nieuwenhuyse Software architect & Angular coach -
Roberto was a great addition to the team for several years, able to tackle all the challenges you can encounter in a technology that is continuously improving.
Marc Caessens Senior Software Program Manager, Marel 
Questions we hear before every assessment
We already have senior developers. Why an outside look?
Because they built it, and nobody can proofread their own writing. Your seniors know the history behind every decision, which is exactly what makes the decision invisible. An outside reader has no history, only the code and the cost. The best assessments we have done were for teams with strong seniors: the report gave them the mandate to fix what they already suspected.
Will this disrupt the team?
We need read access to the repository, a kickoff session, and about an hour per interviewed person. In total, three to five hours of your team's time across the whole assessment, plus the roadmap session at the end. No feature freeze, no branch we block.
Our codebase is not on Nx, or runs an older Angular version.
That is common and not a problem. We assess plain Angular workspaces as often as Nx ones, and older versions usually make the upgrade path one of the most valuable parts of the report.
Is this a way to sell us the execution tier?
No. The roadmap is written so your own team can run it, and most teams do. The Advanced tier exists for teams who have no capacity to execute, not as the intended next step.
What about confidentiality?
We sign your NDA before we see a line of code. Access is revoked at the end, and the report is yours alone.
What does it cost?
The Minimum assessment is €4,900 and the Standard assessment is €12,900, both excl. VAT and fixed for workspaces up to roughly fifty projects. Larger workspaces get a fixed quote after a thirty-minute call. Either way you know the number before we start, and it does not change during the assessment. Execution in the Advanced tier is quoted after the roadmap, when the size of the work is known.
Also from Heckers Software
- Application development Your first application from scratch, a new product for your scale-up, or a section of your enterprise software, built full stack by one senior team. Read more
- Angular and Nx workshops Hands-on training on your own codebase: enterprise Angular patterns, Nx monorepos, AI-assisted development and UI libraries. Read more
Tell us about your project
An audit, a workshop, a new application or a codebase that needs rescuing. Describe where you are and we will tell you honestly whether we can help.
Prefer email? Write to roberto@heckerssoftware.com
It was a pleasure working with Heckers Software and having Roberto on our team.
Nico Vandenbroucke IT-Directeur, Wit-Gele Kruis West-Vlaanderen