Goals
Different tools focus on different aspects of technical debt. This page was created to help you navigate the of technical debt management tools landscape so you can quickly select the ones more likely to help you.
Non-goals
This page does not recommend any particular tool. This would require an understanding of your particular situation. You can use this to build a tool evaluation short list.
Work in progress
This is a living document, updated on a regular basis as more testing information is gathered
Last updated on July 5th 2024
Selection criteria
| wide language support | Only tools that are either language independent or have an extensive programming, scripting and configuration language support |
| cloud-native | Only tools that are themselves on the cloud and connect to your cloud-based source repos, change management tools, CI/CD tools, chat systems, etc… |
Tools quick summary
| CodeScene | Derives technical insights from version control logs. it is language-independent and does not provide language specific code smells. But through in-depth VCS log analysis, it can identify and prioritize hotpots, coupling issues, and people risks. Web site |
| Velocity by code climate | provides dashboard to visualize and monitor team progress, identify and prioritize bottlenecks. While it does not identify technical debt items, identified bottlenecks can often be traces back to technical debt items. Web site |
| Quality by Code Climate | Integrates with your hosted GitHub repo and provides pull request comments if quality, security or coverage issues are found. It also provides TD indicators in the form of hotspot, cognitive and cyclomatic complexity, duplication and general maintainability reports. Web site |
| SonarCloud SonarQube | Language specific tool with support for most programming, scripting and configuration languages. Integrates with your software production pipeline on GitHub, Bitbucket cloud, GitLab, Azure DevOps. Provides insights on code smells, hotspots, vulnerabilities. SonarQube is a self-managed version of SonarCloud Web site |
| GitLab | Integrated software development and delivery platform. It includes its own code analysis tools, but can also integrate with external code quality tools. It also provides insights on inefficiencies in the entire software production pipeline (development, test, code review, CI, CD, monitoring, governance) Web site |
| Develocity | Analyses and optimises Maven, Bazel, sbt, and Gradle build pipelines. Aims to Increase developer productivity by reducing wait time and context switching. Web site |
Types of debt
| code debt | architecture debt | CI/CD debt | people debt | |
| CodeScene | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| SonarCloud | ✅ | |||
| Velocity by Code Climate | ✅ | |||
| Quality by Code Climate | ✅ | |||
| GitLab | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Develocity | ✅ | |||
Functionality
| itemises TD items | estimates TD cost | estimates TD reduction cost | ||||
| CodeScene | ✅ | |||||
| SonarCloud | ✅ | ✅ | ||||
| Velocity by Code Climate | ✅ | |||||
| Quality by Code Climate | ✅ | |||||
| GitLab | ✅ | |||||
| Develocity | ✅ | |||||