SD Times
Software development news, resources, headlines, and industry rankings
SD Times News Digest: SmartBear BearQ, Chainguard Agent Skills — March 18, 2026
SmartBear unveiled BearQ, an autonomous QA system that explores how applications function and adapts to code changes, positioning it as a next‑generation alternative to brittle test scripts. The launch follows a SmartBear survey showing 90% of developers use AI coding tools while 70% say software quality is suffering. Chainguard introduced open‑source Agent Skills, a continuously updated catalog of hardened AI agent modules vetted against security and quality rules. Both announcements target the growing risk that rapid AI‑driven development outpaces testing and supply‑chain safeguards.
Product Management Principles I Learned Building 80+ Enterprise APIs
CDK Global launched over 80 enterprise APIs to modernize automotive commerce, learning that product‑centric decisions trump technical completeness. By focusing first on high‑value, read‑only APIs like the Vehicle Inventory endpoint, the firm achieved rapid dealer adoption and sub‑200 ms response times....
Sauce Labs Introduces Sauce AI for Test Authoring
Sauce Labs announced the general availability of Sauce AI for Test Authoring, an AI agent that converts business intent into framework‑agnostic, executable test suites for web, Android and iOS. The tool promises 90% faster test case generation, 99%+ automated coverage,...
Checkmarx Unveils AppSec Platform for the Age of Agentic Development
Checkmarx introduced Checkmarx One, an application security platform designed for the era of AI‑driven, or “agentic,” development. The solution embeds autonomous AI agents that provide real‑time vulnerability triage, automated remediation, and governance of AI assets across the software supply chain....
The $1.6 Million Weekend: Why Simple API Gateways Fail in the Agentic Era
An enterprise AI contract‑review API that costs $1.58 per document exploded to a $1.6 million bill when exposed as an agentic API. An autonomous agent retried a single request thousands of times, and the pattern repeated across thousands of contracts, revealing...
Opsera Unveils AppSec AI Agents to Power the Shift From Traditional SDLC to AI-SDLC
Opsera announced the launch of its AI‑powered AppSec agents, a new suite designed to embed security, compliance, and architectural validation directly into AI‑assisted development workflows. The agents operate as autonomous pre‑commit guards, automatically scanning AI‑generated code, enforcing SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI‑DSS...
Allstacks Launches Agent to Close the Spec Gap Limiting AI-Assisted Development
Allstacks unveiled its Spec Readiness Agent, an AI‑driven tool that evaluates and improves software specifications before code is generated. The agent integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps and Linear, assigning readiness scores and auto‑generating acceptance criteria, edge cases and draft stories...
JetBrains Previews Air, an Agentic Development Environment
JetBrains has launched a public preview of Air, an agentic development environment that centralizes AI coding agents within its IDEs. Air lets developers assign tasks by referencing specific code symbols, giving agents precise context instead of raw text. It supports...
The Real-Time Data Problem with LLMs
Generative AI models struggle with up-to-date information because they rely on static training data. SerpApi addresses this gap by offering an API that scrapes over 100 search engines and returns structured JSON results, which LLMs can consume for real‑time answers....
Tabnine Fills the Organizational Context Gap for Enterprise AI
Tabnine has unveiled the Enterprise Context Engine (ECE), a platform that injects structured organizational knowledge into AI coding agents. By continuously modeling software architecture, documentation, and engineering practices, ECE moves beyond simple retrieval‑augmented generation to enable agents to reason about...
Gartner Acknowledges Growth of Decision Intelligence Platforms with Inaugural Magic Quadrant
Gartner released its inaugural Magic Quadrant for Decision Intelligence Platforms, signaling a shift from data‑driven to decision‑centric strategies. The report highlights legacy players like FICO alongside newer pro‑code solutions such as Quantexa, and notes that generative AI integration remains early....
Revenium Launches Tool Registry to Give Developers Full Cost Visibility Into AI Agent Deployments
Revenium announced the general availability of its Tool Registry, a platform that gives enterprises end‑to‑end visibility into the true cost of AI agent deployments. The solution goes beyond token‑level tracking by capturing fees from external APIs, SaaS services, and human‑in‑the‑loop...
XAML.io Adds Support for Sharing Code via a Link
Userware released XAML.io 0.6, a browser‑based IDE for .NET built on OpenSilver. The update introduces URL‑based code sharing, allowing anyone to view, run, or fork a project without affecting the original. It also adds native NuGet package support for .NET Standard...
Sauce Labs Launches Industry’s First Programmable Mobile Device Cloud for the AI Era
Sauce Labs announced the Real Device Access API, the first programmable mobile device cloud designed for the AI era. The API lets developers control real Android and iOS devices through HTTP, issuing ADB or xcrun commands, streaming video, and accessing...
Komprise Accelerates Agentic AI With Serverless Compute for Unstructured Data
Komprise unveiled KAPPA, a serverless compute service that lets enterprises enrich metadata for unstructured data with just a few lines of Python code. The offering automates scaling and execution across petabyte‑scale datasets, eliminating the need for traditional ETL pipelines. KAPPA...
WaveMaker Fuses Design and Development with Architecture-First Agentic Application Generation System for Enterprise Dev Teams
WaveMaker unveiled an agentic application generation system that blends AI‑driven code creation with a design‑first, architecture‑first methodology for enterprise developers. The hybrid IDE accepts Figma files and natural‑language prompts, producing tech‑stack‑agnostic markup that is validated before deterministic code generation. By...
Report: FinOps Priorities Are Shifting Left and Expanding
FinOps practitioners are moving financial decision‑making earlier in the software development lifecycle, a shift highlighted in the FinOps Foundation’s 2026 State of FinOps report based on 1,100 respondents. Pre‑deployment architecture guidance is now a top‑requested capability, and the scope of...
Quest Trusted Data Management Platform Makes It Easier for Organizations to Create Reusable Data Products
Quest Software unveiled the Trusted Data Management Platform, a unified suite that combines data modeling, cataloging, governance, quality, and a marketplace to deliver AI‑ready data across enterprises. The solution promises up to 54% faster data‑product delivery, up to 40% cost...
Checkmarx Enhances IDE-Native Agentic Application Security in Kiro
Checkmarx announced that its AI‑driven Developer Assist tool is now embedded directly within the AWS Kiro integrated development environment. The integration scans source code and dependencies in real time, surfacing security findings inside the IDE and synchronizing them with the...
MCP Leaves Much to Be Desired when It Comes to Data Privacy and Security
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was introduced as a universal interface that lets AI agents tap into enterprise data and services. In practice, the protocol has become a lightning rod for privacy breaches: a rogue MCP server harvested WhatsApp chats...
Arcjet Release V1 of Its SDK for Enabling Security Capabilities in JavaScript Apps
Arcjet launched version 1.0 of its JavaScript SDK, delivering a stable, production‑ready API for security functions such as bot mitigation, email verification, rate limiting, and data redaction. The SDK can block malicious bots, enforce custom traffic rules, and protect against...
Planview Releases Connected Work Graph to Provide Insights Into Relationships Across Teams and Initiatives
Planview unveiled its Connected Work Graph, an AI‑driven module embedded in the Planview Anvi platform. The solution maps relationships across OKRs, initiatives, teams, and resources, delivering real‑time visualizations of dependencies. By continuously analyzing millions of work connections, it flags bottlenecks...
How to Design the Software Engineering Organization to Deliver Business Value
Software engineering leaders must proactively design their organization and delivery model to align with the CIO‑defined IT operating model, rather than reacting to legacy structures. The article outlines how to evaluate alternatives, choose between service‑optimized and value‑optimized models, and build...
ScyllaDB Releases Integrated Vector Search: 1B Vectors with 2ms P99s and 250K QPS Throughput
ScyllaDB announced the general availability of its integrated Vector Search feature within ScyllaDB X Cloud, targeting real‑time AI workloads. The service combines ScyllaDB’s shard‑per‑core architecture with a Rust‑based USearch extension to deliver approximate‑nearest‑neighbor indexing. In benchmark tests on the yandex‑deep_1b...
MetalBear Launches Mirrord for CI to Improve Testing Process for Cloud Native Apps
MetalBear introduced mirrord for CI, a tool that lets development teams run continuous‑integration tests directly against existing Kubernetes clusters without provisioning separate test environments. The solution proxies traffic, environment variables, and files between the CI runner and the cluster, providing...
This Week in AI Updates: Google’s UCP Standard, a Redesigned Slackbot, and More (January 16, 2026)
Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open‑source standard that lets retailers, marketplaces and payment providers speak a common language for real‑time inventory, pricing and checkout within conversational interfaces. Salesforce rolled out the redesigned Slackbot, an out‑of‑the‑box AI agent...
Copilot Studio Extension Now Available in VS Code
Microsoft announced the general availability of the Copilot Studio Extension for Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to create and manage Copilot agents directly within their IDE. The tool mirrors traditional software development workflows by integrating source control, pull‑request reviews, change...
Testing AI-Infused Applications: Strategies for Reliable Automation
AI-driven workflows are being embedded directly into applications, creating testing challenges due to the nondeterministic nature of large language models (LLMs). Parasoft’s experience shows that exact‑match verification fails, driving up costs when tests repeatedly call external LLM APIs. Teams can...
Kaggle Introduces Community Benchmarks to Allow for Custom Evaluations of AI Models
Google’s Kaggle platform has launched Community Benchmarks, a new feature that enables data scientists to create, run, and share custom evaluation tasks for AI models. Users can define individual tasks, combine them into benchmarks, and generate leaderboards that compare model...
Commvault Launches Unified Data Vault – Giving Cloud Developers an Easy and Unified Way to Bring Resilience to S3 Data
Commvault introduced Cloud Unified Data Vault, a cloud‑native service that adds Commvault‑managed, S3‑compatible endpoints to protect data written via the S3 protocol. The solution delivers air‑gapped, immutable protection—encryption, deduplication, and policy‑driven retention—without requiring agents or custom scripts. It targets developers...
Your Accessibility Strategy Is Missing a Product Manager
Software teams still treat accessibility as technical debt, resulting in widespread non‑compliance—only 54% of firms meet WCAG 2.2 and 95% of home pages contain errors. The article proposes an Accessibility Product Manager who owns accessibility from strategy through delivery, turning it...
Planview Appoints Matt Zilli as Chief Executive Officer
Planview announced Matt Zilli as its new chief executive officer, succeeding Razat Gaurav who will join the board. Zilli, previously Planview’s President of Field Operations, brings experience as former Clarizen CEO and a key architect of Marketo’s growth to a...
AI-Driven Testing: Context, Agents, and the Model Context Protocol
SD Times has launched the 2026 Supercast Series — AI in Test, a year‑long program aimed at guiding software teams through AI‑driven quality assurance. The kickoff session on February 5 explores context‑aware AI, autonomous agents, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as solutions...
Microsoft to Acquire Osmos to Bolster Fabric Platform
Microsoft announced the acquisition of Osmos, an agentic AI data‑engineering platform, to embed its technology into the Microsoft Fabric suite. Osmos’ AI agents automatically convert raw data into analytics‑ready and AI‑ready assets that feed Fabric’s unified data lake, OneLake. The...
December 2025: AI Updates From the Past Month
December saw a surge of AI‑centric announcements, from Anthropic turning its Skills workflow into an open, portable standard to OpenAI debuting GPT‑5.2‑Codex, a coding‑focused model with enhanced security and long‑context abilities. Google introduced Gemini 3 Flash, a faster, lower‑cost reasoning model, and...
Why Flaky Tests Are Increasing, and What You Can Do About It
Flaky tests in mobile development have surged, with Bitrise Mobile Insights reporting a jump from 10 % in 2022 to 26 % in 2025. The rise coincides with a 20 % increase in pipeline complexity and faster release cadences, turning occasional glitches into...
New InstallAware X18 Launching With Solana Payment System
InstallAware Software has unveiled InstallAware X18, its latest installer platform that embeds a Solana cryptocurrency payment system directly into the setup wizard. The solution converts fiat to SOL in real time, records each transaction on the Solana blockchain, and charges...
Beyond Code: How Bitrix24’s AI Powers End-to-End Project Management
Bitrix24 launches a full‑lifecycle AI‑powered project management platform that embeds intelligence directly into planning, execution, and reporting. The solution replaces fragmented AI add‑ons with a unified workspace that combines task management, Gantt/Kanban views, chat, video calls, and CRM. AI CoPilot...