Bedtime thoughts: who made that breaking change?
It amazes me that we still have to go through the hassle of discovering bugs in production. Sometimes, even long enough after they release. And that's where it hurts the most actually. Nothing is infallible, that's for sure but the feedback loop can get so spaced sometimes that it is hard to find out what caused the regression/failing design in the first place. Worse I feel is when that change was not even coming from you, or your team, but from another one. Or what about a third-party publishing changes in an external solution like Google Tag Manager that suddently breaks some UI due to unterminated setInterval? And at least, breaking the UI can hopefully be spotted "quickly".
What makes this process frustrating is that hunting the guilty change is not always obvious. When you have the chance to get a stacktrace or hints of any sort to identify the root cause, that can be sped up greatly. But sometimes you do not, as bugs get reported by users or spotted in logs systems in which the quantity of data available for debugging may be scarce to say the least. And that also supposed that you know where to look for that data. Companies usually make use of log systems of some sort but generally only for programming related jobs. Which means that changes made in external tools, like my GTM example, won't get displayed in those log systems. Instead, you would have to go find out the right person in your org chart to claim a peek. The same goes for other martech tools, like Zapier. In that latter case, it may be even worse, as, to the best of my knowledge, it does not provide versioning of Zaps attributes. Which means that you need to either 1/ have some process for logging changes and communicating it across the company or 2/ take the risk of pushing a change that will break some of that zap's consumer behaviour down the line.
Maybe there's a space for some meta loghouse tool that would collect all possible changes pushed to your system in a central place to make it faster to access that information?