The Half of CI We Forgot to Automate
The article draws a parallel between rigorous physical testing in aerospace and the lack of equivalent practices in software deployment, highlighting that current CI pipelines focus on symbolic correctness rather than real-world behavior. While automated tests verify internal consistency, they fail to produce evidence that systems perform reliably under realistic conditions. The author argues for a shift toward realistic, repeatable testing that generates verifiable evidence for go/no-go decisions.
- ▪Aircraft are certified through rigorous physical testing, not just design consistency, a practice largely missing in software deployment.
- ▪Current CI pipelines automate checks for code correctness but do not validate how systems behave in real-world scenarios with real infrastructure and faults.
- ▪The article calls for realistic, scripted, and instrumented testing to generate reproducible evidence that can replace faith-based deployment decisions.
- ▪Without such evidence, teams continue to rely on intuition, staging environments, and rollback plans, leading to incidents and eroded trust.
- ▪The next advancement in CI should focus on generating tangible evidence of system resilience, shifting the focus from who wrote the code to whether it’s safe to ship.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Half of CI We Forgot to Automate Why go/no-go decisions still run on faith in contracts, and the gap between pipelines that prove correctness and pipelines that produce evidence. April 17, 2026 A new aircraft does not get cleared to fly because its blueprint is internally consistent. It gets cleared because someone strapped it to a rig, ran it through scripted abuse, instrumented every joint, and — after hours and hours of tests — produced evidence that the design survives a controlled approximation of the real world. That ritual has a name in aerospace and motorsport — shakedown — and it exists because the cost of guessing is paid in catastrophic failures, irreparable damage to human lives, and the heavy material losses that follow.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Selective Creativity.
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