SmartBear BearQ Expands Autonomous QA with Sources and Workflows to Tackle Coverage Gaps

SmartBear BearQ Expands Beyond Test Automation with Sources and Workflows

Software testing company SmartBear has released two AI-driven features for its BearQ agentic quality assurance system, addressing challenges that have emerged as artificial intelligence accelerates code development1

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. The new capabilities, Sources and Workflows, shift focus from automating individual tests to coordinating what needs testing across complex systems where existing coverage may already exist in disparate tools.

According to SmartBear, automating individual tests is no longer the primary bottleneck in autonomous QA. The harder challenge is determining what still requires testing across sprawling systems, particularly when much of it is already covered by tests residing in other tools1

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. These additions extend SmartBear's work in GenAI-powered test automation while broadening the scope to how QA work is selected and managed2

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Sources Connects Requirements with Existing Coverage to Identify Coverage Gaps

Sources expands BearQ's visibility beyond the application itself by integrating requirements, bugs, and existing test coverage from multiple platforms1

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. Through Jira integration, BearQ now receives information about what ought to be tested, while connections to SmartBear Reflect and SmartBear Zephyr reveal what existing tests already cover. This combined view helps teams identify coverage gaps, avoid duplicate tests, and focus new testing where it is genuinely needed2

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The context matters because a successful test run only answers questions represented in the tests themselves. A changed requirement or known defect can demand a different set of checks2

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. By drawing on this context before writing anything new, BearQ helps teams end up with fewer duplicate tests and more targeted coverage. Alan Braun, head of product ecosystem at Atlassian, noted that Jira tasks represent only part of what QA must reconcile, alongside bug reports and existing manual and automated tests2

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. SmartBear indicated additional Sources connections are planned for the fourth quarter of 20261

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Workflows Coordinates Activities and Lets Teams Automate Test Runs

Workflows enables teams to chain jobs together behind a single trigger, coordinating sequences of QA activities rather than just automating individual tests1

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. Once a build lands in CI/CD pipelines, BearQ can spin up a test environment and run regression tests against it. Teams can also schedule the same sequence if they prefer not to tie testing to builds. Activities can include preparing environments, running targeted or regression tests, and updating connected systems2

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Whatever a workflow run produces goes back into the team's connected systems, creating a coordinated loop of QA activities informed by requirements and coverage1

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. For engineering teams, this distinction between automating an individual test and coordinating the process around it addresses practical overhead that persists even when test execution itself is automated2

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Progressive Autonomy Addresses Trust Barriers in Autonomous Quality

How much of a workflow runs without human review remains up to each team through what SmartBear calls progressive autonomy1

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. Teams begin with people signing off on what BearQ does, then hand over more of the process as their confidence grows. This approach directly addresses trust, which was the top barrier to adopting or scaling autonomous testing, named by 23% of 1,436 U.S. and U.K. respondents in a survey SmartBear released on September 301

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Review steps and focus areas provide controls over how independently the system operates, with human oversight setting the pace for autonomy2

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. Bridges Smith, vice president of product management for AI at SmartBear, called autonomous testing "the first step" and described the bigger opportunity as connecting how an application actually behaves with what a team intends it to do and the test suite it has built up1

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. People would still set the guardrails, Smith said, describing the shift as a move "beyond autonomous testing toward autonomous quality"1

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SmartBear has been building BearQ out since it first appeared in March, when the company opened early access for web applications built by midmarket software-as-a-service providers1

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. A September update made it an assignable agent inside Jira. About 32,000 organizations use SmartBear's software, which includes the Swagger tools for designing application programming interfaces1

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. Both new features will receive a public demonstration Thursday in a livestream with "Project Hail Mary" author Andy Weir1

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