Skuld: a self-learning tool for impact-driven technical debt management

Abstract

As the development progresses, software projects tend to accumulate Technical Debt and become harder to maintain. Multiple tools exist with the mission to help practitioners to better manage Technical Debt. Despite this progress, there is a lack of tools providing actionable and self-learned suggestions to practitioners aimed at mitigating the impact of Technical Debt in real projects. We aim to create a data-driven, lightweight, and self-learning tool positioning highly impactful refactoring proposals on a Jira backlog. Bearing this goal in mind, the first two authors have founded a startup, called Skuld.ai, with the vision of becoming the go-to software renovation company. In this tool paper, we present the software architecture and demonstrate the main functionalities of our tool. It has been showcased to practitioners, receiving positive feedback. Currently, its release to the market is underway thanks to an industry-research institute collaboration with Fraunhofer IESE to incorporate self-learning technical debt capabilities.