SmartBear, helping teams build, test, and ship quality software at AI speed and scale, released a survey that finds 70% of software experts say application quality has already degraded as AI accelerates development, and 60% already experienced quality issues in the past year as application development outpaced testing.

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Quality is suffering and anxiety is rising. 70% of survey respondents are concerned that application quality is already suffering.

The survey of 273 CTOs, CIOs, software developers, quality assurance directors, and others–almost three quarters at director level or above – at mostly midsize to enterprise software and SaaS companies also found that:

• AI code generation has hit critical mass. 93% have adopted AI coding tools. Forty percent use it to generate more than 40% of code. In 12 months, 60% of survey respondents expect it to generate more than 40% of code. Almost 7 of 10 respondents worked at companies with more than $50 million in revenue.
• Quality is suffering and anxiety is rising. 70% of survey respondents are concerned that application quality is already suffering; 67% worry about quality decline in next 12 months as AI produces applications faster; 60% experienced quality issues in the past year as development outpaced testing.
• Bottlenecks expected as manual testing remains common. Almost 7 of 10 (68%) are worried that faster AI development will create testing bottlenecks. Almost 60% of teams do more than 40% of their application testing manually. Almost 9 of 10 (87%) have partially or fully automated more than 20% of application testing, yet 92% still test manually.
• Leadership doesn’t fully grasp the risk. 65% of survey respondents are concerned about under-investment in application-level testing vs. code-based testing. Also, nearly two-thirds (65%) worry that decision-makers don’t recognize the risks of faster AI development without equivalent improvements in testing.

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“These results underscore growing concern that the speed of software development, driven by AI, is outpacing the ability of teams to test the resulting applications and ensure they work as they’re supposed to,” says Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear. “It only takes one failure that can tank a customer experience and destroy brand good will. The good news is that a new solution, in the form of autonomous testing by a team of agents, has arrived to augment manual or inadequate testing automation, setting a new standard for application integrity. Now companies need to get on board and invest in closing these gaps to ensure that applications avoid failure, delays, and continuously deliver the outcome that businesses and consumers expect.”

SmartBear today launched BearQ™, the agentic QA system with always-on teammates that autonomously explore and test applications, delivering continuous application integrity so software works as intended with governance to operate at AI speed and scale. BearQ’s capabilities enable autonomous, adaptive, software application testing that also discovers and prioritizes testing to the most important workflows.

More than nine of 10 (92%) of survey respondents see autonomous testing as a quality improvement and almost all are increasing testing investment this year. Almost nine in 10, 86%, are increasing testing investments by more than 11% this year.