Get it on Google Play

SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA

SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA

Author: Software Engineering Daily May 5, 2026 Duration: 55:15
Software Engineering Daily
NewsTechnology

AI coding tools have dramatically accelerated the pace of development, and the bottleneck in the software development lifecycle has shifted to code validation and testing. However, the conventional tools and workflows that QA teams have relied on were not designed for a world where a single engineer can generate thousands of lines of code in a day.

SmartBear is a software quality platform spanning test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability. The company recently launched an AI-native QA platform called BearQ, which deploys autonomous agents that explore web applications, learns their structure and behavior, and authors and maintains test cases continuously.

Fitz Nowlan is the VP of AI and Architecture at SmartBear and the co-founder of Reflect, which is a web testing platform acquired by SmartBear in 2024. In this episode, Fitz joins Kevin Ball to discuss why web UI testing is uniquely challenging, how BearQ’s multi-agent architecture coordinates exploration and testing, why test data management becomes a hard distributed systems problem at scale, and what agentic development means for the future of QA.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SmartBear.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive deep into the conversations that shape how we build and understand complex systems with Data Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This podcast pulls from a rich library of technical discussions, each one a focused exploration into the specific tools, architectures, and challenges that define modern software engineering. Rather than surface-level news, these episodes offer sustained, thoughtful dialogues with the engineers and thinkers who are working on the front lines of data infrastructure, distributed systems, and emerging technologies. You'll hear detailed breakdowns of real-world problems and the nuanced solutions teams are implementing, providing a practical sense of how theoretical concepts translate into production code and resilient platforms. The archive serves as an enduring resource, whether you're looking to grasp the fundamentals of a new database or understand the intricate trade-offs in a system design. Tune in for a consistently substantive listen that treats software engineering with the depth and seriousness it deserves, all through the unfiltered lens of expert conversation.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Official website RSS
youtubelinkedinspotifyapple_music
Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:31
A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems Building software that runs across many machines is notoriously difficult. Developers have to grapple with problems such as race conditions, partial failures, and message…
Moving Beyond RAG with Precomputed Context [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:48
Retrieval has become one of the central problems in building useful AI systems. The standard approach to grounding a model in one’s own data has been retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, where an agent searches a vect…
The Death of Online Anonymity [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:42
Age verification is reshaping how people access the internet. An ever-growing patchwork of laws can now require government IDs, facial age estimation, or behavioral inference before you can enter digital spaces. Discord,…
TypeScript 7 and What Comes Next [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:15
TypeScript is a programming language that builds on JavaScript by adding a system of types. Those types let developers describe the shape of their data and catch mistakes before code ever runs, while also powering the au…
The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:42
It is widely reported that a gap has emerged between enterprise spending on AI and the durable value captured from that spend. Individual employees have enthusiastically adopted coding assistants and chatbots, yet those…
AI and the New Global Security Landscape [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:32
The conversation about AI often focuses on software, automation, and the race between attackers and defenders in code. However, some of the most consequential risks lie further afield, in domains where a mistake is measu…
How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:51
News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a sy…
Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:57
For two decades, the cloud has been shaped by human developers writing code and managing its deployment. Now a growing share of production code is generated by LLMs with little human review. Because that code is not full…
SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:28
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this…

12345»