yeaight7 Metric Impact Analyzer
Use this skill when a change may affect metrics, semantic models, dashboards, reporting, or stakeholder-facing KPIs.
Goals
- Detect whether a technical change also changes business meaning.
- Identify likely downstream breakage in BI tooling and dashboards.
- Separate harmless refactors from definition-level changes.
What to Inspect
- Metric definitions and calculation logic.
- Semantic model changes (dimensions, measures, relationships).
- Renamed or removed fields referenced by saved queries or dashboards.
- Changed filters, time windows, or default values.
- Changed joins, granularity, or fanout.
- Contract-breaking field type changes (e.g., INT → FLOAT, nullable → NOT NULL).
Change Classification
| Change type | Risk level | Action required |
|---|---|---|
| Column rename with alias preserved | Low | Validate alias propagation |
| Description or label change | Low | Confirm no tooling parses descriptions |
| New optional field added | Low | No action unless it changes defaults |
| Filter condition tightened | Medium | Validate that the new filter matches intent |
| Metric formula changed | High | Stakeholder review required |
| Grain changed (e.g., day → week) | High | All downstream rollups must be revalidated |
| Dimension removed | Breaking | Cannot ship without migration plan |
| Join path changed | Breaking | All dependent metrics may be affected |
Analysis Steps
- Summarize what changed technically (field names, types, logic, joins).
- Classify each change using the table above.
- Infer what may have changed semantically — ask: "will this metric return a different number for the same time period?"
- Identify who or what downstream may break: dashboards, saved queries, alerts, exports, downstream dbt models, BI tool semantic layers.
- Flag whether stakeholder sign-off is required before the change is promoted.
Output Format
- Technical change summary — what exactly changed, at the field/model level.
- Business meaning impact — does this change what the number means to a business user?
- Likely reporting or dashboard breakage — specific assets at risk.
- Required validation — what must be confirmed before shipping.
- Stakeholder confirmation needed? yes / no / depends — with reason.
Validation / Done Criteria
- Technical change summary covers all modified fields, models, and logic.
- Every change is classified by risk level using the table above.
- Downstream breakage is identified or explicitly noted as "unknown — downstream consumers not traced."
- Stakeholder confirmation requirement is stated as yes / no / depends, with a reason.
Rules
- Be explicit about uncertainty when you cannot trace all downstream consumers.
- Use plain business language in the final summary — avoid dbt/SQL jargon in the stakeholder section.
- Do not edit code or models unless explicitly asked.