[jph]

Technical debt pain points are great areas for startups to tackle IMHO.

I'm working on a large upgrade project for custom messaging workflow, developed ad hoc during the past six years, without tests and specs.

If a startup offered developer tools to help with this, we'd pay many thousands of dollars.

Here are areas where I'd pay money right now-- because right now I'm essentially writing simple tooling for my team, and it would be better, cheaper, and faster to buy professionally-developed tools:

* Replatform from one MVC framework to another. For example from TurboGears to Rails.

* Refactor unchecked exceptions to explicit error handling of return codes, for example from Java to Go.

* Some kind of visualization that highlights the business value of various code paths, for example to discover the code paths that my highest-value users are taking.

Perhaps these kinds of tools exist already-- if you know of them, I'd be very happy to know more.

[nahname]

The only tool that I have found to help with those kinds of problems is a human being and lots of hard work. The more short cuts you try to take, the worse it will be for you in the end.

[Mongoose]

I've come across tools that claim to expose and measure potential technical debt, such as techdebt.org or SQALE (http://www.sqale.org/details). I'd be skeptical of any software that claims to provide an automated mechanism for paying down debt. The consequences of debt are too varied and subtle to be generalizable.