SmartBear’s BearQ is Now Available in Jira to Power Autonomous Testing

SmartBear, helping teams build, test, and ship quality software, announced that its agentic QA system, BearQ, is now available as an assignable agent in Atlassian Jira. This means the agent joins other leading AI coding agents on the platform as an assignable agent built specifically for testing.

As teams build governed agent loops in Jira to scale their work safely, BearQ brings that same discipline to testing by embedding directly into the Jira workflows teams already use to assign work and keep plans coordinated, according to SmartBear.

With BearQ for Jira, users can support their AI software development lifecycle (SDLC) by autonomously testing the software as it's being developed to close the loop between the code an agent writes and the quality an agent validates.

"Jira is where work gets defined, and assignable agents help carry it out across the SDLC," said Alan Braun, head of product ecosystem at Atlassian. "BearQ is built specifically for testing, exploring the application the way a person would, rather than solely reviewing the code underneath it. As testing grows more complex, that's what helps teams ship faster and safer."

BearQ tests applications as they are, not against outdated scripts or specs. Rather than reviewing code line by line, BearQ explores the running application the way a real user would, clicking through flows, exercising edge cases, and validating behavior across the full app, not just the lines that changed, the company said.

“Developers are using AI to create and ship code faster than ever, but testing is falling behind because it’s often manual and constrained by brittle automation that cannot keep pace. Not only is there more to test, but it's increasingly hard to know what to test,” said Dan Faulkner, SmartBear CEO. “BearQ addresses those challenges so QA can keep up with today’s fast-moving codebases. We’re pleased to deepen our work with Atlassian and Jira.”

As with other agents in Jira, users will be able to assign work to BearQ, mention it in comments to get help, and add it to workflow transitions with no manual invocation and no context switching. BearQ assignable agents will find what scripts can miss and fix what slows QA down by turning testing into a living, learning system that evolves with applications. Customers can ask BearQ to record the tests and results in Zephyr, SmartBear's testing system of record for Jira, said the vendor.

BearQ launched in March as SmartBear’s agentic QA system to help teams keep up with AI-code development and ensure application integrity, meaning that applications work as intended, all the time.

For more information about this news, visit https://smartbear.com.