Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Not long ago, the answer to who writes tests was simple: the quality assurance (QA) engineer does. They sat downstream of development, received a build, and translated requirements into scripts. It was a defined role with a defined output. That clarity is gone. In 2026, the person or system responsible for test creation might be a business analyst (BA) mapping out a customer journey, an AI agent expanding test coverage overnight, or a QA engineer who hasn’t written a traditional script in months.

Quick summary: AI is creating anxiety and excitement — teams can get more work done faster, but does all this automation leave the worker behind? Not necessarily, says one performance engineering leader. The AI revolution, he says, is another technological wave. To ride it, performance engineers must embrace the change.

At some of the most sophisticated engineering organizations in the world, the best developers are already writing zero percent of code manually. AI agents are generating features, spinning up test suites, and moving software through delivery pipelines faster than most governance frameworks were designed to handle. The speed is real, and so is the exposure that comes with it.

Quick summary: AI accelerates code creation, but its inherent confidence pushes structural risks downstream, where they surface as costly, release-blocking problems. As code output scales, performance validation that can’t keep pace becomes a headache and a business risk. Agentic performance testing embeds skepticism and performance awareness into the development process before risk can compound. Software development requires specialized expertise for a reason.

AI is now writing more of your code than ever. But the problem is that your test suite was built to catch errors, not to catch the difference between what an AI agent produced and what your original specification actually required. As AI tools accelerate development velocity, the volume of code moving through pipelines is outpacing traditional quality processes.

Take this scenario: Your team ships a release with 91% code coverage. Every test in the suite passes. The pipeline is green, and leadership signs off. But two days later, a critical defect surfaces in production. Upon investigation, you find that the changed code was never actually tested, and the tests that were run covered different paths entirely. That 91% was real, but it was just measuring the wrong thing. And as AI tools generate more of the code inside those pipelines, the gap widens.

This year has already marked a leap forward for Tricentis NeoLoad with the arrival of agentic capabilities that open the door to a new era of performance engineering. But even as we reshape what’s possible, we remain focused on the everyday realities and priorities of performance teams. With the 2026.1 release, NeoLoad continues to evolve in practical, customer-centered ways.

Data analytics and science professions have undergone a dramatic transformation in the last decade. Demand for data talent has risen steadily, but the skills required to succeed in the field have evolved right alongside it. And now AI is a defining variable shaping what the next decade of analytics work will look like. It speeds up routine tasks, gives data access to more business users, and raises new questions about what skills will matter most in the not-so-distant future.

Software testing has a bad rap for bottlenecks — and nowhere is that truer than in the SAP world. An overwhelming majority of SAP orgs continue to rely on manual testing practices that can consume up to 30% of implementation budgets, making QA out to be a persistent roadblock to transformation. To be fair to SAP QA teams, the issue is not as much about inefficiency as complexity.

Over 1,000 people around the world tuned in as Tricentis CEO Kevin Thompson and VP of AI David Colwell unveiled our new integrated platform, followed by a live demo from Enterprise Solution Architect Matt Serpone. From our headquarters in Austin, Texas, we unveiled a unified solution designed to help enterprises treat quality as a coordinated system rather than a collection of disconnected tools.