Software testing company SmartBear Software Inc. is expanding its BearQ agent quality assurance system beyond test automation, releasing two new features today.
Both additions target the part of quality assurance that artificial intelligence has made more difficult by speeding up coding. SmartBear calls them sources and workflows.
Automating individual tests is no longer the bottleneck, the company said. The more difficult task now is to figure out what still needs to be tested in large-scale systems, since much of it is already covered by testing in other tools.
Sources expand BearQ’s view beyond the application itself. Requirements and bug reports now flow from Atlassian Corp.’s Jira. so the agent knows what needs to be tested. SmartBear’s own testing tools Reflect and Zephyr show what existing tests already cover. BearQ uses this context to find gaps in reporting before writing anything new, so teams end up with fewer duplicate tests.
Workflows continue from there, allowing a team to chain tasks behind a single trigger. For example, once a build enters the continuous integration and delivery pipeline, BearQ can set up a test environment and run regression tests on it. Whatever the run results in goes back into the team’s connected systems, and anyone who prefers not to tie tests to builds can include the same sequence in a schedule. How much of a workflow goes without human review is up to the team.
Progressive autonomy is the name of this regulation at SmartBear. Teams start with people signing off on BearQ’s work, then hand off more parts of the process as they grow more confident. Trust was the biggest barrier to launching or scaling autonomous testing, cited by 23% of 1,436 respondents in the U.S. and U.K. in a survey released Sept. 30 by SmartBear.
Bridges Smith, vice president of product management for AI at SmartBear, called autonomous testing “the first step.” According to Smith, the greater opportunity lies in connecting the actual behavior of an application to the intentions of a team and the test suite it has built. People are still setting the guardrails, Smith said, describing the shift as a step “beyond autonomous testing toward autonomous quality.”
SmartBear has continued to develop BearQ since its initial release in March, when the company opened early access to web applications built by mid-market software-as-a-service providers. An update in September made it an assignable agent in Jira. SmartBear’s legacy product line includes Swagger tools for designing application programming interfaces, and the company says about 32,000 organizations use the software.
Additional Sources connections are due before the end of the quarter. Both features will be premiered publicly on Thursday in a livestream with “Project Hail Mary” author Andy Weir.
Image: SmartBear
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