DRS: Debt Reduction System

Tech Debt is to a repo what Drag is to F1. We're here to solve that!

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Inspiration 🏁

Our submission is called DRS.

In Formula 1, DRS (Drag Reduction System) opens a flap on the rear wing to reduce air resistance and give the car a massive speed boost.

In software development, technical debt is our drag.

Developers write comments like
// TODO: Change this after PROJ-123
during reviews and quick fixes—but these TODOs are buried in code, forgotten over time, and left to rot.
The core reason? There is no formal process for TODOs / FixMe / REFACs:

  • No tickets are created
  • No effort is tracked
  • No ownership is assigned

This creates invisible friction that slowly but consistently reduces a team’s velocity. We built DRS to eliminate that drag.

What it does

DRS is the aerodynamic upgrade for your Atlassian workflow.

It identifies “drag” in your codebase, i.e, TODO comments introduced in Bitbucket diffs, and automatically converts them into actionable, trackable Jira tickets. DRS also detects related existing tickets and links them accordingly, then notifies the original author when a linked ticket is completed, allowing them to address the TODO at the right time without forgetting. By formalizing TODOs, DRS ensures that technical debt is visible, owned, and accounted for as real engineering work.

How we built it 🛠️

DRS integrates directly with Bitbucket pull requests and Jira using webhooks and diff analysis. It scans code changes for TODO-style comments, extracts relevant context from the diff, and creates structured tickets in Jira. We intentionally used **robust rule-based parsing * to maintain code privacy and keep operational costs extremely low.

Challenges we ran into

  • Accurately identifying meaningful TODOs while avoiding noise and false positives
  • Supporting different comment styles and programming languages
  • Designing the system to be helpful without overwhelming teams with tickets
  • Coordinating cross-product workflows between Bitbucket and Jira, ensuring seamless data flow, correct linking, and consistent ownership across both tools

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an end-to-end system that works across Bitbucket and Jira, enabling real cross-tool collaboration
  • Successfully formalized TODO comments into first-class, trackable engineering work
  • Chose a privacy-first, cost-efficient architecture by using deterministic parsing
  • Delivered a practical solution to a real developer pain point within the hackathon timeframe

What we learned

We learned that technical debt often persists not because it’s ignored, but because it’s informal and untracked. Adding structure, ownership, and visibility can drastically improve how teams manage long-term code health.

What's next for DRS: Debt Reduction System 🚀

Next, we plan to add smarter prioritization, automatic ownership assignment, and effort estimation for TODOs. Long-term, we want DRS to become a central system for measuring, tracking, and actively reducing technical debt across teams and repositories.

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