In a new survey, 7 out of 10 software and QA professionals say the rise of AI-driven development is reducing the quality of applications. BearQ autonomously investigates and verifies that software works as intended
SOMERVILLE, Mass. – (BUSINESS WIRE) – SmartBear, which helps teams build, test, and ship high-quality software at the speed and scale of AI, today announced the release of BearQ. It’s an agent QA system with always-on teammates that autonomously explore, learn, and test your applications, providing continuous application integrity to ensure your software works as intended.
BearQ is a foundational part of SmartBear’s suite of products, SmartBear Application Integrity Core™, that spans the SDLC and supports customers’ test journeys. Built for the era of AI-driven development, BearQ transforms software testing from a static safety net to an intelligent, adaptive system that continuously investigates and validates real-world user experiences. BearQ defines application integrity, which SmartBear defines as continuously measurable assurance that software behaves as intended, according to governance, and at the speed and scale of AI.
“The gap between the speed of AI-powered software development and the ability to test the resulting applications is widening, creating a greater potential for application failures that harm businesses, consumers, and industry,” said Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear. “BearQ becomes an important autonomous exploration and testing solution for the industry to bridge these gaps and strengthen application integrity. SmartBear’s long history of innovation in software quality and testing positions SmartBear to address this disruption to the SDLC.”
As the use of AI coding tools increases, application testing lags due to manual processes and poor automation. Companies already face a trade-off between skipping application validation or delaying release and waiting for testing. Given that AI coding becomes even faster over time, test coverage will further decrease and quality will become a bottleneck rather than a strategic advantage.
A recent SmartBear survey of 273 software testing and quality decision makers highlights the depth of the problem. In the SmartBear Survey: Closing the AI Software Quality Gap, 9 out of 10 survey respondents have adopted AI coding tools. 7 in 10 are already concerned about quality issues, 60% have experienced quality issues in the past year, and 68% are worried that faster AI development will create testing bottlenecks.
“BearQ is a game-changer for how we look at our entire application,” said Jim Butler, vice president of engineering at Follett Software. “This will save our test engineers significant time while ensuring application integrity.”
Verification migration
Application integrity changes the focus of QA in the software industry from “does the code work?” “Does the application experience match the intended results?” BearQ enables this paradigm shift by putting application understanding and intent at the center of testing. Rather than relying on predefined test cases or weak automation scripts, always-on QA teammates manage the test lifecycle by discovering how your application behaves through autonomous exploration, automatically creating and maintaining tests, continuously validating key user journeys, and reporting on quality, coverage, and risk.
Unlike traditional testing and automation that relies on constant human effort and maintenance, BearQ:
- Fully autonomous, think and test like real users. Traditional QA relies on code-based tests, predefined test cases, or automation that can break down under pressure. Passing tests can give teams a false sense of confidence while bugs are introduced into production. BearQ explores applications the same way you would. Discover the most important workflows and prioritize testing. This ensures that important experiences are actually tested. BearQ tests and thinks like a real user, validating results rather than just running code.
- Adapt to your application. Modern applications are constantly evolving, and traditional test automation scripts can’t keep up with these changes. When the application changes, BearQ automatically adapts to ensure that application changes do not trigger false alarms. This prevents automation from fading and continuously verifies application integrity.
- Double the impact of your QA team. Manual testing is not scalable and automation requires constant attention. BearQ acts as an always-on teammate that autonomously discovers your workflow, creates and maintains tests, and performs validation. This dramatically expands coverage and enables QA teams to operate at the pace of AI-driven development.
- Provides built-in governance controls. BearQ includes structured guardrails, context controls, and transparent visibility into agent activity so teams can define what agents need to validate, where they need to explore, and how tests align with business intent. This allows the agent QA team to investigate and test in a manner consistent with business practices.
“While the use of AI speeds up the creation of large amounts of code, developers are finding that much of that code requires significant modification,” said Melinda Barrow, research director for AI Assurance, ALM, Quality and Portfolio Strategy at IDC. “As test automation increases, we require test automation and agent testing with effective governance and agent orchestration. Products like SmartBear’s BearQ exemplify that using AI for testing and contextualized AI assurance is essential.”
BearQ initially focused on web applications developed by mid-market SaaS providers, but will soon support API testing, mobile applications, and on-premises environments. Click here to learn more about BearQ and apply for GA early access.
More detailed survey results can be found here.
About smart bear
SmartBear provides application integrity for modern technology stacks, governance to operate at the speed and scale of AI, and continuous, measurable assurance that your software works as intended. SmartBear provides deep test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability features. Set new quality standards for application delivery teams with integration across the SDLC.
SmartBear is trusted by more than 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers across 32,000 organizations, including 75% of the largest financial institutions and industry leaders like Adobe, JetBlue, and Microsoft. SmartBear’s most popular brands include Swagger, TestComplete, Reflect, QMetry, Zephyr, and more. As stewards of a collaborative open source community, SmartBear meets with customers to make the technology-driven world a better place. For more information, please visit www.smartbear.com or follow us on LinkedIn, X, and Reddit.
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