Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor have become genuine superpowers for API development. They draft OpenAPI definitions, generate endpoints, propose schema changes, and write test cases — all from inside the IDE, in real time. Teams using these tools are generating API definitions faster than most thought possible even a few years ago. That velocity is real, and it’s reshaping how engineering teams think about their toolchain.

An automation suite that’s losing ground rarely makes it obvious. Coverage numbers look reasonable. Tests are running. The CI pipeline is green more often than not. Meanwhile, the team is quietly working around what isn’t working – rerunning tests until they pass, deferring maintenance, or accepting a regression window that’s wider than it should be. Those workarounds can feel normal. They aren’t.

For teams building APIs as products, the developer portal is the front door to your business. It’s where partners discover your endpoints, where customers authenticate and start integrating, and where the quality of the experience directly shapes adoption. Now that changes.

AI is accelerating how teams build and ship software, but validating quality is getting harder, not easier. More AI-generated code means more to test, more API drift to catch, and more documentation that falls behind. The work is growing faster than teams can keep up.

There is a specific kind of confidence that comes with deploying software. Not just “the tests passed” confidence, but the kind that comes from knowing the services your application depends on still behave the way you expect them to. Preserving that integrity becomes harder as systems grow, teams move faster, and AI agents become active participants in delivery workflows.

For everyone in QA inside the Atlassian ecosystem, the last few months have made one shift obvious. AI is changing how software gets built, and the quality function must change with it.

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.

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.

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.

Teams using TestComplete face a common problem: one small test change can produce a wide set of modified files, and not all of them deserve the same level of scrutiny. The fix is not to review everything equally – it is to classify TestComplete artifacts by risk, then standardize how your team reviews, stages, and merges them. This article outlines this process and offers best practices for using Git effectively with TestComplete projects.