Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

A conversation with Gastón Marichal, QA Manager at QAlified, on why the hardest part of agentic QA has nothing to do with the technology. In the first installment of this series, we heard from Huy Tieu, a Katalon product manager building an AI quality companion from the inside. This time we wanted the other side of the table: someone who has to make agentic QA work for real client teams, on real delivery timelines, with real consequences if it goes wrong.

CI/CD testing is the practice of running automated tests throughout a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to validate every code change before deployment. By automating unit, integration, API, and end-to-end tests, teams can catch bugs early, improve code quality, and release software faster with confidence.

Vibe testing is what happens when the way software gets built changes faster than the way it gets tested. For years, QA worked on a simple assumption: developers write the code, testers verify it. That assumption breaks down when the code is being generated by an AI from a plain English prompt. The person shipping the feature may not have written a single line of it – and may not fully understand how it works under the hood.

Enterprise software today isn't just complex, it's mission-critical. A single production issue can disrupt operations, impact revenue, and erode customer trust overnight. Yet despite years of investment in enterprise test automation and growing QA headcount, many organizations still ship broken software and miss release windows. The uncomfortable truth? Enterprise software doesn't fail because teams aren't testing enough.

For organizations developing regulated products, risk management and testing are closely connected. Every identified risk must be assessed, mitigated, verified, and documented to support compliance requirements and release decisions. Yet these activities often happen in separate systems. Risk assessments may live in dedicated risk management tools or spreadsheets, and testing is usually managed elsewhere.

"Agentic" is the word of the year in software marketing. Every product that sends an automated email is agentic now. Every tool with a chatbot interface is powered by AI agents. The term has been stretched to the point where it tells you almost nothing about what a product actually does.