Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One night, Daniel Rizzy was the only person awake on Zylker’s IT team, and the clock was already running. He was also the only thing standing between a P1 outage and 10,000 customers. Rizzy works nights for ZylkerXchange, Zylker’s foreign currency exchange app. He lives on the city’s outskirts, where the air is clean and quiet, and the night shift suited that life. Most nights, nothing happened. Some nights, everything did.

For decades, companies measured IT efficiency through technical indicators: servers up, systems online, equipment working. But does that actually mean a good experience for the people doing the work?

Remember being excited (or dreading, depending on the stage of your career and the company you worked at) about writing unit tests? Or sweating all the details in your end-to-end and integration tests you were sure covered all the use cases your users would hit? These days a lot of UIs are slowly being replaced by a single input field and an agent that promises to deliver the same value a UI would, but with the elegance and pun-ness of a “Jarvis”.

The Agile software development lifecycle was designed to surface problems early, with short sprints, iterative testing, and continuous integration built on the premise that faster feedback loops produce better software. AI coding tools have changed the velocity equation across every phase of that loop, but the phases designed to catch failures are struggling to keep up because build speed and validation capacity have not accelerated at the same rate, and the gap between them is widening with every sprint.

In January we launched Tests in Bitbucket Pipelines – a single place to track, organize, and understand your test health over time. In April we added automatic flaky test detection so unreliable tests get flagged before they slow your team down. But spotting a problem is only half the battle. Day to day, your team still needs to act on a test – track it as work, clean it up, or route it to the right person.