Financial due diligence reveals balance sheet health. Technical due diligence reveals whether the engineering team can actually maintain and extend the software you're acquiring.
Traditional code audits examine architecture and technical debt. But they miss the human factor: What happens if key engineers leave after the deal closes?
ContributorIQ answers the questions that determine post-merger success:
The bus factor measures how many engineers would need to leave before a project stalls. ContributorIQ calculates this using Degree of Authorship (DOA) analysis, a research-backed methodology that goes beyond simple commit counts.
A bus factor of 1 on a critical repository means a single departure could halt development. We've seen acquisitions where 60% of repositories had a bus factor of 1. That's not a software company. That's a collection of single points of failure.
Not all contributors are equally engaged. ContributorIQ classifies each engineer into lifecycle stages:
When your acquisition target has three "Peak" contributors and two of them are "Winding Down," you have a retention problem that needs to be priced into the deal.
The Organization Health Score (0-100) rolls up bus factor, knowledge concentration, and contributor activity into a single metric. Use it to:
Orphaned files have no active contributor with meaningful ownership. They're the code that nobody on the current team truly understands. In M&A, orphaned files represent maintenance risk: bugs will take longer to fix, and changes may introduce unexpected regressions.
On the target organization (requires their cooperation during diligence)
Across all repositories in minutes
Showing bus factor, health scores, and lifecycle distributions
Suitable for investment committee presentations
A mid-market PE firm was evaluating a $40M acquisition of a B2B SaaS company. Financial due diligence showed healthy ARR growth and reasonable churn.
ContributorIQ revealed a different story:
The firm renegotiated terms to include an earnout tied to key employee retention and a lower upfront purchase price reflecting the integration risk.
ContributorIQ is built for non-technical stakeholders. You don't need to understand code to understand:
Our PDF reports are designed for investment committee presentations, with executive summaries that translate technical metrics into business risk language.
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