SmartBear BearQ always-on teammates drive autonomous testing
SmartBear is a company focused on delivering what it calls “application integrity for modern tech stacks” today.
So, in practice, that means API lifecycle management and observability capabilities across the SDLC to ensure continuous, measurable assurance that software just works as intended with enough governance to operate at AI speed and scale.
The company has now announced the release of BearQ, an agentic quality assurance (QA) system with always-on teammates that autonomously explore, learn and test applications for continuous application integrity.
BearQ is a foundational part of SmartBear’s product suite, the SmartBear Application Integrity Core. It promises to move software testing from a static safety net into an intelligent, adaptive system that continuously explores and validates real user experiences.
Validation trepidation
As the use of AI coding tools increases, SmartBear suggests that application testing is falling behind and is consigned to being a highly manual process with inadequate automation. Companies already face a tradeoff: forgo validation of applications or delay releases to await testing.
Given that AI coding will now move even faster over time, we might agree that testing coverage will erode further and quality will become a bottleneck, not a strategic advantage.
“The AI-driven gap between the speed of software development and the ability to test resulting applications is getting wider, creating a huge potential for application failures that hurt companies, consumers and industries,” said Dan Faulkner, SmartBear CEO. “BearQ will be a critical autonomous exploration and testing solution for the industry to close these gaps and deliver enhanced application integrity. SmartBear’s long history of innovation in software quality and testing makes SmartBear well-positioned to address this disruption to the SDLC.”
A recent SmartBear survey of 273 software testing and quality decision makers underscores the depth of the problem. In the SmartBear Study: Closing the AI Software Quality Gap, nine of 10 survey respondents have adopted AI coding tools. Seven of 10 are concerned that quality is already suffering, 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 in how we look across our application surface,” said Jim Butler, VP of engineering for Follett Software, a SmartBear customer. “With it, our test engineers expect to experience huge time savings while still ensuring application integrity.”
Application integrity shifts the software industry’s QA focus from “does the code work?” to “does the application experience match the intended outcome?” and so BearQ promises to enables this shift by placing application understanding and intent at the centre of testing.
Always-on QA teammates
Rather than relying on predefined test cases or brittle automation scripts, its always-on QA teammates manage the testing lifecycle by discovering how the application works through autonomous exploration, creating and maintaining tests automatically, validating critical user journeys continuously and reporting on quality, coverage and risk.
The company says that BearQ is fully autonomous and thinks and tests like a real user.
Traditional QA relies on code-based testing, predefined test cases, or automation that can break under pressure. Teams can gain a false sense of confidence from passing tests while bugs slip through production. In contrast, BearQ explores an application the way a user would. It discovers and prioritises testing to the most important workflows. This ensures that the experiences that matter actually get tested.
Against automation decay
Modern applications evolve constantly, but traditional test automation scripts break with these changes. As an application changes, BearQ adapts automatically, ensuring that application changes don’t trigger false alarms. This prevents automation decay and ensures ongoing validation of application integrity.
Manual testing doesn’t scale and automation requires constant care. BearQ acts as an always-on teammate that autonomously discover workflows, create and maintain tests and execute validation.
“While the use of AI increases the speed at which massive amounts of code are created, developers find that much of that code needs significant remediation,” said Melinda Ballou, research director for IDC’s AI assurance, ALM, quality and portfolio strategies. “This demands test automation and agentic testing, with effective governance and agent orchestration, as testing becomes increasingly autonomous. Products such as SmartBear’s BearQ exemplify the imperative for use of AI for testing and contextualised AI Assurance.”
BearQ, initially focused on web applications developed by mid-market SaaS providers, will shortly support API testing, mobile applications and on-premise environments.