New CAST Highlight update reveals ‘good’ v. ‘bad’ technical debt

Paris and New York – July 24, 2025 - Chief Information Officers confronting technical debt now have a new way to prioritize thousands of hours in IT development time, announced CAST, a leader in software mapping and intelligence technology. The company today released the latest version of CAST Highlight, which distinguishes between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ technical debt, helping teams prioritize remediation efforts across all custom applications.

“Each day CIOs face the same question: ‘Which 100 of my 1,000 applications should we focus on?’,” said Greg Rivera, Head of Product at CAST. “Now, within seconds, the answer is clear, ranked, and prioritized. In true CAST Highlight fashion, each issue also comes with data-driven recommendations and quantification of the effort required to resolve it.”

Key capabilities of the new “Portfolio Advisor for Technical Debt” feature include:

• Prioritizing applications based on business criticality and issue severity
• Categorizing debt types, such as low Software Health (e.g. issues with resiliency, agility, and complexity), outdated open-source components, and obsolete technology versions (e.g. Java, .NET)
• Drilling down to the application level to understand specific issues and remediation needs

“Not all problems are created equally,” continued Rivera. “Many can wait with minimal business impact. The real challenge has been knowing what to prioritize. With this new intelligence in-hand, CIOs can get a centralized view of their technical debt, direct their teams with confidence, and update the board on progress.”

“Good” technical debt is defined as lower importance applications with minimal debt density. “Bad” technical debt arises from business-critical applications with high tech debt density in multiple areas. CAST Highlight generates these insights based on industry-standard best practices for code quality and up-to-date components.

Additional new capabilities in this release include:

• Terraform Cloud Maturity Insights to speed cloud migration and modernization for applications with Terraform
• Docker Cloud Maturity Insights to streamline cloud adoption for applications running Docker containers
• Enhanced Custom Segmentation for more detailed Portfolio Advisor dashboards, with new segmentation options such as OSS component names, technical debt values, and technology versions

The release is available to all CAST Highlight customers.

About CAST

Businesses move faster using CAST technology to understand, improve, and transform their software. Through semantic analysis of source code, CAST produces 3D maps and dashboards to navigate inside individual applications and across entire portfolios. This intelligence empowers executives and technology leaders to steer, speed, and report on initiatives such as technical debt, GenAI, modernization, and cloud. As the pioneer of the software intelligence field, CAST is trusted by the world’s leading companies and governments, their consultancies and cloud providers. See it all at castsoftware.com.