SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA

SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA

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

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 shaping the future of artificial intelligence with the Machine Learning Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This curated collection pulls from the broader Software Engineering Daily library, focusing entirely on the intricate world of ML engineering. Each episode features a detailed, technical interview with engineers, researchers, and architects who are building the systems behind today's most advanced AI. You'll hear them break down complex topics like model deployment, data pipeline challenges, and the practical trade-offs involved in taking research from a notebook into production. The discussions are grounded in real-world implementation, moving beyond theoretical concepts to explore the tools, failures, and successes that define the field. For developers and technical leaders looking to understand the nuts and bolts of applied machine learning, this podcast offers a valuable archive of knowledge. It's a direct line to the practitioners who are solving hard problems every day, providing insights you can apply to your own work. Tune in to gain a clearer perspective on how machine learning is integrated into modern software, one detailed conversation at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
SED News: Restricted Models, IDE Wars, and the DeepMind Mafia [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:58
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…
Grafana’s Approach to AI-Native Observability [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:29
Advanced software systems have long been more complex than any single engineer can fully understand. Observability is the established solution to this problem, but with AI agents now generating code, deploying changes, a…
Building Software That People Love [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:26
Building great software always involves technical problem solving, but the best software goes beyond function. It feels fluid, coherent, and genuinely fun to use. This quality lives at the intersection of engineering and…
Mina the Hollower [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:48
Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in…
Foundation Models for Structured Data [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:00
Predictive modeling is a core element in modern systems, and powers capabilities such as fraud detection, loan approvals, and recommendation systems. These systems typically operate on structured, relational data stored…
Biome and the Future of JavaScript Tooling [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:56
Modern web development requires an ever-growing collection of tools including formatters, linters, bundlers, and plugins. Each tool typically has its own configuration, dependencies, and performance cost. As applications…
Preparing for Q-Day [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:18
Most of the cryptography securing the internet today rests on mathematical problems that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable timeframe. That assumption is now being tested. Recent advances in quantum compu…
Developing Multiplayer Games in Godot [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:21
Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency…
Web Native Game Development [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:08
The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Uni…