Nobl9 has launched the new Hydrogen platform designed to identify customer-impacting technical debt in a way engineers and business stakeholders can understand. Hydrogen gives software reliability issues their own Agile workflow, so that teams can break the cycle of neglecting the very issues that cause arduous on-call rotations, avoidable outages, and engineering burn-out.

Modern software developer tooling and workflow emphasizes speed of new feature delivery, but most organizations fall into a pattern of jamming known reliability and technical debt issues into Jira backlogs, where they disappear until things break in production. This “tech debt” spans everything from known bugs, to security patches, to testing, to strategies for managing performance, and many other software reliability issues.

Jira is great for prioritizing development efforts, but prioritizing software reliability issues requires much more context and live data. According to the company, Hydrogen is the first platform that helps engineering teams define software reliability requirements, to have the data to prove to the business when tech debt issues rise to the highest priority, and to bring that data back into Jira. With three simple steps, Hydrogen can give developers the insights to take control of technical debt in the context of their Jira milestones.

Hydrogen supports many existing metrics sources including Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Google BigQuery, AppDynamics, Thousand Eyes, Dynatrace, Prometheus and more. Hydrogen allows you to quickly connect the data you already have to goals around reliability, error rates, and (un)acceptable technical debt.

Once you have collected data and set thresholds based on current understanding of user expectations, Hydrogen automates workflows based on policies for expected quality and engineering decisions.