AI coding tools have significantly increased development speed, shifting the software development lifecycle bottleneck to code validation and testing. Traditional QA tools weren’t built for today, where one engineer can produce thousands of code lines daily.
SmartBear offers a software quality platform for test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability. The company introduced BearQ, an AI-native QA platform utilizing autonomous agents to explore web applications, learn their structure and behavior, and continuously create and maintain test cases.
Fitz Nowlan, VP of AI and Architecture at SmartBear and co-founder of Reflect, acquired by SmartBear in 2024, joins Kevin Ball to discuss web UI testing challenges. They cover BearQ’s multi-agent exploration and testing coordination, test data management’s complexity at scale, and the potential of agentic development for QA’s future.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SmartBear.
Kevin Ball, or KBall, is vice president of engineering at Mento, a coach for engineers, and co-founder/CTO of two companies. He started the San Diego JavaScript meetup and organizes Latent Space’s AI inaction group.
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