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 programming language 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 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.

Before building Caribou, we were working in a fast growing startup for a number of years. As part of managing our engineering teams, we wanted a way to see the technical improvements happening in the codebase and an easy way to recognise those engineers that work on these improvements. Unfortunately, we did not find anything that we could use off-the-shelf for this, and so we built Caribou!

Caribou is currently in Beta and is available for free. Please go ahead and give it a try! Let us know what you think!