/metric-impact-analyzer

name: metric-impact-analyzer
description: Use when a change may affect metrics, semantic models, dashboards, reporting, or stakeholder-facing KPIs and you need to know whether business meaning or downstream BI assets change.

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

1. Summarize what changed technically (field names, types, logic, joins). 2. Classify each change using the table above. 3. Infer what may have changed semantically — ask: "will this metric return a different number for the same time period?" 4. Identify who or what downstream may break: dashboards, saved queries, alerts, exports, downstream dbt models, BI tool semantic layers. 5. Flag whether stakeholder sign-off is required before the change is promoted.

Output Format

1. **Technical change summary** — what exactly changed, at the field/model level. 2. **Business meaning impact** — does this change what the number means to a business user? 3. **Likely reporting or dashboard breakage** — specific assets at risk. 4. **Required validation** — what must be confirmed before shipping. 5. **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.