This week in AI updates: Google's Data Commons MCP Server, shared projects in ChatGPT, and more (September 26, 2025) – SD Times
AI, or artificial intelligence, is technology that attempts to simulate human cognitive function. AI has made its way into the software development space in a number of ways. Visit the AI article list to expand your AI knowledge.
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Observability is a way for development teams in an organization to view their program state. Failing to provide developers with insight into their tools and processes could lead to unaddressed bugs and even system failures. Read about the latest observability content here
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In the past, the CI/CD pipeline was simply a place to integrate code. Developers would write their code in GitHub, pass it through the pipeline, and then deploy it. The pipeline has become a much more critical piece of the software delivery lifecycle today.
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Modern cloud-native applications, often leverage microservices, containers, APIs, infrastructure-as-code and more to enable speed in app development and deployment
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The Importance of Security Testing
With more development teams today using open-source and third-party components to build out their applications, the biggest area of concern for security teams has become the API. This is where vulnerabilities are likely to arise, as keeping on top of updating those interfaces has lagged.
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Mobile App Testing involves analyzing mobile apps for functionality, usability, visual appeal, and consistency across multiple mobile devices. It helps ensure an optimal user experience, irrespective of the device used to access the app.
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Today’s distributed software environments incorporate a variety of APIs with every interface your software touches, from mobile to microservices. Each API has to be continuously tested and verified to ensure your software functions as it should. Parasoft’s API testing platform makes quick, efficient, and intelligent work of such requirements.
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Ensure your application’s resilience, and make sure your software performs as expected under diverse operating conditions. (sponsored by Parasoft)
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DevSecOps is the DevOps community’s approach to bringing security into the development lifecycle. Businesses want to deliver software, but cannot afford to release unreliable or insecure applications— therefore security needs to be baked in much sooner than it has traditionally been.
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Securing an application is just as important as building it in the first place. As data becomes more valuable, there are more people who want to steal it and use it for their own personal gain. Making sure applications are indeed secure has always been a challenge, as hackers try to stay one step ahead of defenders.
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Secrets are essential for integrating your infrastructure with databases and SaaS services. Doppler‘s developer-first security platform empowers teams to manage, orchestrate, and govern secrets across any environment.
In 2023, there was an 18% decline in the number of open-source projects that are considered to be “actively maintained.” This is according to Sonatype’s Annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report.
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Development Managers need a different type of content than developers… They need to know what platforms, tools, trends, and issues they should be thinking about. SD Times delivers those unique topics here
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Agile software development has been around since the 1990s, but didn’t get the name until the famous meeting of 17 renowned software development thought leaders at Snowbird, Utah resulted in an Agile Manifesto. The idea behind Agile software development is to reduce time to market by enabling faster iterations of smaller segments of software.
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Value stream management involves people in the organization to examine workflows and other processes to ensure they are deriving the maximum value from their efforts while eliminating waste — of resources, time and assets. It is the practice that truly brings the business side and IT side together as partners in creating value for the organization.
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DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development and IT operations as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle.
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Gravitee helps organizations manage and secure their entire API lifecycle with solutions for API design, management, security, productization, real-time observability, and more.
AI, or artificial intelligence, is technology that attempts to simulate human cognitive function. AI has made its way into the software development space in a number of ways. Visit the AI article list to expand your AI knowledge.
Learn More
Value stream management involves people in the organization to examine workflows and other processes to ensure they are deriving the maximum value from their efforts while eliminating waste — of resources, time and assets. It is the practice that truly brings the business side and IT side together as partners in creating value for the organization.
Learn More
The Data Commons MCP Server allows AI developers to easily access all of Data Commons’ publicly available datasets. It can be accessed via the Gemini CLI or in Google Colab, and Google has a sample agent in Colab as well to make it easier to get started.
The newest version of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite features better instruction following, more concise answers to reduce token costs, and stronger multimodal and translation capabilities. The updated Gemini 2.5 Flash offers better agentic tool use and is more efficient, leading to reductions in cost.
Shared projects allow multiple people to add files and instructions to a project, so that ChatGPT can provide more tailored responses for everyone involved. “Members can chat with the project’s context to stay on the same page as new information gets added and create work that stays consistent in tone and style,” OpenAI explained.
The company also added new connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, GitHub, Dropbox, and Box. This allows ChatGPT to offer more relevant answers based on information in those tools.
Finally, ChatGPT now has ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, and 27701 certifications; an expanded SOC 2 report; role-based access controls; and enhanced SSO.
Microsoft has restructured its Marketplace to serve as a central place for organizations to find cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents.
This new reimagining brings together Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource to simplify cloud and AI management, Microsoft explained.
It includes tens of thousands of cloud and industry solutions that can help with everything from data and analytics to productivity to security. It also features more than 3,000 AI apps and agents.
CData has announced the launch of a new managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform bringing together AI assistants, agent orchestration, workflow automation, and embedded AI applications—combined with access to over 300 enterprise data sources.
According to the company, Connect AI preserves data semantics and relationships in enterprise data to give AI agents better context while still providing governance over that data access.
CData’s Connect AI inherits the existing security and authentication protocols set up in the source system. Data access gets logged under the identity of the authenticated user or agent, and additional controls can be layered on top and managed in Connect AI.
A number of data companies—including Snowflake, Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI—have announced the formation of a new open source initiative to create a vendor- neutral standard for defining and sharing semantic metadata.
The Open Semantic Interchange has three main goals: enhance interoperability across tools and platforms, accelerate adoption of AI and BI applications, and streamlining operations.
According to the group, organizations rely on a patchwork of AI, BI, and analytics tools, and this initiative will develop a shared semantic standard that allows these tools to “speak the same language.”
By standardizing how semantics are defined and shared, the Open Semantic Interchange hopes to ensure that data is governed, consistent, and context-rich, helping with adoption of AI.
AWS has announced the launch of its open source Nova Act extension, which allows developers to build browser automation agents in their IDE, reducing the need to switch between dev and test environments.
With the new extension, developers can use natural language to describe their workflow and then the Nova Act extension will generate an agent script. That script can then be modified in a notebook-style builder, where developers can integrate APIs, data sources, and authentication, and can validate it with local testing tools.
“This extension transforms my agent development workflow by positioning Nova Act extension as a full-stack agent builder tool—a complete agent IDE for the entire development lifecycle. I can prototype with natural language, customize with modular scripting, and validate with local testing—all without leaving my IDE—ensuring production-grade scripts,” Donnie Prakoso, principal developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a blog post.
The solution uses AI to identify and fix issues in code. It will automatically flag high-impact issues in pull requests so that developers can understand where and why a bug might occur. It can also detect typos, formatting errors, and logical mistakes in pull requests. Finally, it can generate unit tests for the code in a pull request.
“The only thing easier than debugging errors with Sentry is having fewer errors to debug in the first place,” said Rohan Bhaumik, senior product manager at Sentry. “By combining predictive error detection with automated testing, AI code review dramatically reduces wasted time in code reviews, strengthens test coverage, and lets teams merge with confidence.”
Read last week’s updates here: OpenAI Codex updates, Claude integration in Xcode 26, and more (September 19, 2025)
AI, AWS, Cdata, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Sentry, Snowflake
Jenna Barron is News Editor of SD Times.
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