Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

SmartBear at Atlassian Team '26: A Recap of What's New with AI and Rovo

What did Atlassian Team ’26 reveal about the future of software quality and AI-powered delivery? In this recap from the event floor inside the Anaheim Convention Center, SmartBear shares key themes from the event, including Atlassian Rovo, the Teamwork Graph, AI-driven workflows, and how QA teams are adapting to faster, AI-assisted software delivery inside Jira. See quick highlights from the event floor, SmartBear’s latest Zephyr innovations, and how conversational AI and quality intelligence are becoming part of the modern software delivery workflow.

How to scale AI test automation without losing test visibility

According to SmartBear’s Closing the AI Software Quality Gap study, 93% of teams are already using AI to generate code. The same study found that 60% expect AI to produce nearly half of all code within the next year. This shift in development velocity is already impacting software testing and quality. Most teams say application quality is suffering, and 60% have experienced quality issues in the past year because development is moving faster than testing can keep up.

The API testing gap: How AI-accelerated development challenges software quality

While AI accelerates development velocity by a factor of ten, a critical consequence remains: testing hasn’t kept pace. According to SmartBear research, 70% of software professionals report that their application quality has already degraded due to AI-accelerated development. Even more concerning, 60% have experienced quality issues in the past year as development velocity outstrips testing capacity.

What's new in SmartBear ReadyAPI: AI-powered test generation | ReadyAPI

SmartBear ReadyAPI's AI-powered test generation instantly builds functional test cases from a simple natural language prompt. Stop writing API tests manually and let AI do the heavy lifting. In this demo, we show how you can take an OpenAPI spec and generate tests complete with assertions, authentication headers, test data, and request chaining. Whether you test complex microservices or APIs with hundreds of endpoints, ReadyAPI helps QA teams move faster without sacrificing quality or control.

Scale AI test automation without losing visibility | QMetry + Reflect integration

AI is changing how testing gets done. As automation grows, so does the complexity of tracking what’s been tested, what passed, and what’s ready to release. See how SmartBear Reflect and QMetry work together to scale AI-powered test automation without losing visibility or control. Reflect makes it easy to create and run automated tests using plain language, while QMetry brings structure to that speed, connecting tests, results, and reporting into a single system of record.

AI code created a new testing problem | From the Bear Cave Ep. 3

SmartBear’s study Closing the AI software quality gap found that 60% of teams have already experienced quality issues tied to AI-generated code, evidence of how increased abstraction is changing how software gets built. When development shifts from well-defined requirements to prompts and generated outputs, it becomes much harder to understand what the system is actually supposed to do, and what you should be testing against.

New Zephyr Skills for Rovo: AI-powered test management in Jira | Zephyr

Release day shouldn't mean chasing answers across Jira. SmartBear Zephyr is the Jira-native testing system of record that empowers your team to deliver better software, faster. In this demo, see how Zephyr Skills for Rovo bring test management and automation insights directly into Jira. Connect planning, testing, and delivery in a single, unified workflow within the Atlassian system of work so your team can make faster, more confident release decisions.

Reflect vs. Playwright: Choosing the right test automation approach

Organizations with AI mandates face a fundamental choice in test automation: adopt AI-native testing tools like SmartBear Reflect or use AI coding tools to accelerate adoption of code-based frameworks like Playwright. Reflect is a cloud-based, no-code test automation platform built around accessibility and speed. Playwright is Microsoft’s open-source, code-based testing framework built for flexibility and engineering control.