Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Every release brings new capabilities to help QA teams work more efficiently, improve collaboration, and adapt to the evolving demands of software testing. The Xray Summer '26 Product Release Webinar introduced the latest innovations across the platform, from AI-powered capabilities to usability improvements and a preview of what's coming next. Whether you joined the live session or are catching up now, this article highlights the key announcements from the webinar.

SmartBear BearQ, an agentic QA system, has won a 2026 CRN Tech Innovator Award. CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, named BearQ a winner in the Application Development and DevOps category, calling it out among the most innovative technologies shaping the IT channel this year. AI has changed how fast software gets built, but for many organizations, testing hasn’t kept pace.

Your team already knows when a campaign starts to underperform, when spend spikes, or when web traffic shifts. What you don't have is the speed to turn that insight into action. Someone still has to investigate, decide what to do, pull in the right people, and coordinate the work. That takes time. As a data-driven CMO, I've lived this every day. I can know the instant something changes in the data, but there's still a large gap between insight and action. Today, we're closing that gap.

You can now execute DDL and DML operations through the Managed Data Lake Service.

Platform teams want to maximize the value of data in motion, but separate workstreams for stream processing, monitoring, KRaft migrations, and data governance create friction as environments grow. As a result, teams spend more time managing operational overhead and less time building. Today, we’re excited to announce Confluent Platform (CP) 8.3.0, built on Apache Kafka 4.3.0, reinforcing our core capabilities as a data streaming platform.

Steering lets a client redirect an agent while the agent is still working, so a follow-up message reshapes the answer in flight instead of cancelling the Run and starting over, or waiting for it to finish. In the AI Transport SDK, a Run encapsulates the agent's output for a single turn (including multiple iterations around an agentic loop). The last release, v0.5.0, made a single agent turn survive a crash by splitting a Run into re-attemptable Steps.

Fivetran’s Db2 portfolio is now complete, bringing modern analytics to all Db2 users.

We have big news for platform and AI infra teams: *Kong AI Gateway 2.0 is available today in private beta*. It runs on its own dedicated runtime, ships on its own release cadence, and carries a completely reimagined user experience designed around the way teams actually build with AI: models, MCP servers, and agents as first-class citizens, not plugins bolted onto an API gateway.