A fancy name for necessary questions
Due diligence is the investigation you do before committing to something important. In a transaction, it can cover finance, law, commercial performance and much more. Technical due diligence looks at the technology, the people running it and what it will take to keep the promises being sold.
The question is not “is this code beautiful?” It is “what are we taking on?” A product can be useful and commercially successful while depending on a fragile deployment process or a single person who knows where everything lives.
Ask to see the ordinary work
I would rather see someone deploy a change, explain an incident and demonstrate a restore than sit through another architecture slide with no awkward arrows. Look at ownership of repositories and accounts, access, dependencies, operating costs and how changes reach customers.
Then connect it to the business. If usage doubles, what breaks first? If a key engineer leaves, who can operate the service? If a supplier changes its terms, is there a way out? These are investigation questions, not automatic findings. The answer needs evidence and context.
A useful report makes decisions easier
A finding should explain the observation, its likely consequence, what remains uncertain and a practical next step. An undocumented process and a confirmed data exposure do not belong in the same bucket just because both need attention.
This is not the same as a penetration test, and it is not a promise that nothing bad will happen after the deal. It is a clearer picture of the risks, strengths and work ahead. For supplier assessments, the NIST guide linked below offers a more formal starting point; it is not a complete merger-and-acquisition checklist.