As a Test Automation Lead, I noticed a pattern. Our weekdays were efficient but predictable. Pipelines ran, tests passed or failed, bugs were logged. The machine worked. But innovation does not thrive inside a perfectly oiled machine forever. So we introduced a simple but powerful ritual.

No Jira commitments. No delivery pressure. Just one question every few Fridays: “What’s slowing us down, and what if we tried fixing it ourselves?”

What Are Experimental Fridays?

Experimental Fridays are intentional innovation activity.
On a random Friday, usually driven by the “need of the hour”, we pause regular work and pick one focused theme:

• A blocker someone is facing

• A manual process that feels outdated

• A dependency that keeps repeating

• A tool we’ve been curious about but never had time to try

The goal is not perfection. The goal is learning, prototyping, and momentum. Sometimes the output is a working solution. Sometimes it’s a failed experiment with valuable lessons. Both are wins.

A Friday That Started With a Blocker

One Friday morning, the stand-up took a different turn.

Team Member:
“All API tests are passing, but production still feels unhealthy. Latency spikes, retries are increasing, and some endpoints behave oddly under load.”

Another voice joined in.

Another Team Member:
“Yeah, our reports only say pass or fail. There’s no sense of how healthy the backend really is over time.”

I broke the silence.

Me:
“What if we stop asking did the API pass today and start asking how fit is our API system overall?”

That question flipped the day. Instead of fixing a single test or tuning a threshold, the team started whiteboarding. We looked at latency trends, error rates, throughput, consistency, and how performance degraded over time, not just within a single test run.

Someone said it out loud:

Team Member:
“This sounds less like testing… and more like a fitness score.”

That was the spark. By end of the day, the idea of a Performance Fit Index had taken shape. Not a replacement for pass/fail, but a layer above it. An algorithmic way to evaluate API health holistically, across multiple parameters and over time. That Experimental Friday didn’t end with a finished product. It ended with a new way of thinking. And eventually, it became the Performance Fit Index, a concept designed to treat backend APIs like long-term athletes, not one-day sprinters.

If you want to dive deeper into the philosophy and mechanics behind it, this article captures it beautifully: Performance Fit Index – The fitness tracker your backend API deserves

That Friday reminded us of something important: Sometimes the real blocker isn’t a failing test. It’s the question we’re no longer asking.

Highlights from Our Experiments

🎥 Video Solution for Execution Analysis

Description: Built an in-house execution recording system to visually capture test runs and failures in real time.
Impact: Reduced build analysis time by nearly 50%, enabling faster debugging and quicker decision-making.

📊 Integrated Chart Solution for Endpoint Monitoring

Description: Implemented a visual dashboard highlighting backend endpoints breaching performance thresholds.
Impact: Enabled proactive performance tuning and eliminated guesswork in identifying bottlenecks.

🤖 Automated Endpoint Discovery System

Description: Developed an automated mechanism to detect and onboard new backend endpoints directly into the automation pipeline.
Impact: Removed external dependencies and significantly accelerated test coverage for new services.

⚡ Leveraging On-Demand Instances for Efficient Testing

Description: Optimized test execution by dynamically spinning up on-demand instances based on workload needs.
Impact: Improved execution speed while reducing infrastructure cost and resource wastage.

🔗 Zapier, Jira Automations, and Slack Apps

Description: Introduced lightweight automations to streamline notifications, ticket updates, and workflow handoffs.
Impact: Reduced manual effort and improved team focus by automating repetitive operational tasks.

Why Experimental Fridays Work

Beyond tools and prototypes, something more important happened.

• Junior engineers felt safe proposing ideas

• Seniors enjoyed building without deadlines

• The team collaborated across comfort zones

Testing stopped feeling like a conveyor belt and started feeling like craft again.

These Fridays became:

• A break from monotony

• A catalyst for ownership

• A shared problem-solving playground

And most importantly, a reminder that processes should evolve with people, not trap them.

The Takeaway

Experimental Fridays are not about innovation theatre.
They are about creating space.
Space to ask uncomfortable questions.
Space to fail without consequences.
Space to build solutions that actually fit your context.
Sometimes the best process improvement does not come from a roadmap or a retrospective.
Sometimes, it starts with someone saying:

“This is painful… can we try something today?”

And choosing to say YES!