Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There’s something satisfying about contract testing the contract-testing tool. The SmartBear MCP Server is the integration layer between AI coding assistants and the PactFlow API, so when we decided it needed Pact consumer tests of its own, we were subjecting our own code to the same standards that we recommend.

The pull request looked perfect. Two approvals, clean diff, all checks green. The team shipped it Thursday afternoon. By Friday morning, support tickets were coming in. On a popular mid-range Android device, the new checkout button rendered behind a promotional banner: visually present but physically untappable. Every reviewer read that code, yet none of them could have caught it, because the defect was never visible in the diff. It only ever appeared on the device.

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.