A tool to help you manage technical debt

Hello!

Following the post from a couple of months ago, we are happy to announce that Caribou, our tool to help software engineers manage technical debt is live! The product is currently in beta, available for free and we’re looking for feedback! You can find it at https://www.hellocaribou.com/

Caribou helps software teams manage long-term technical migrations in their projects. For example migrating from one networking library to another or migrating a codebase from one architecture pattern to another. These changes usually happen over a span of a few months and without any tooling, they can be difficult to manage. It’s difficult to understand how much progress has been made, what is still left to do and who are the engineers helping move the migration forward. Caribou was built to solve these problems.

So how does it work? In simple terms, Caribou is a Github application which, after being configured, monitors all the changes in your repository and displays a dashboard with the progress of specific migrations along with who is contributing to these migrations. Caribou allows you to define all sorts of migrations using an easy-to-use rules engine; for example changing the project architecture, replacing a library or changing some coding conventions. You can get inspired by our examples in the docs section: https://www.hellocaribou.com/documentation/

Currently, Caribou is still in Beta. We believe the product can provide a lot of value as it currently stands, but there is more functionality that we’re looking to add in the coming months such as Slack integration and Pull Request comments so that engineers can get valuable feedback in their PRs.

Please give it a try at https://www.hellocaribou.com/ and let us know what you think!

P.S. The backend is running on AWS Lambdas and it is written entirely in Kotlin 😎 Feel free to ask questions about our experience building with these technologies!