Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

At SmartBear, we recognize organizations that improve software quality by increasing clarity, alignment, and confidence across the development lifecycle with the Developer Visibility Award. For 2025, the award goes to Datalex, a leading airline e-commerce solutions provider. Datalex equips airlines with API-driven platforms that provide tools for driving revenue and profit as digital retailers.

You’ve probably heard of OpenClaw. Maybe you’ve seen the demos where an AI agent opens a browser, navigates to your CRM, fills in a form, and files a support ticket. No API required. Maybe you thought “that’s cool but I’d never run that at work.” Your employees already are. According to Permiso’s research, 22% of enterprise customers have employees running OpenClaw without IT approval.

Traditional synthetic data generation approaches, still called “Test Data Management” (TDM) by legacy vendor, were designed for a world where applications were monolithic, databases were the center of gravity and change happened slowly. The world looks a lot different now. Modern systems are distributed, often times event-driven, and increasingly powered by streaming data and AI agents. In this environment, batch-oriented synthetic data generation fails to capture how systems actually behave.

In Part 1 and Part 2 we explored why testing modern software is so difficult. Production data is the most valuable input for testing, but it’s locked away because it contains PII and sensitive context. Traditional Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) was built for batch databases, not streaming systems. And AI coding agents amplify every weakness in existing test strategies because they need current, realistic data or they generate buggy code based on outdated assumptions.

Ever seen a workflow pass QA, then fail the moment users retry, refresh, or hit a timeout? That gap usually isn’t about a “wrong input.” It’s often because the system is in a different state when the same input arrives. In state transition in software testing, the state decides what’s allowed, what must be blocked, and what should happen next. It is one of the simplest ways to make these workflows behave predictably in the real world.

Building a web application crawler came with plenty of challenges—here’s what we learned. Recently, we built a web application crawler from scratch—which had some scratching their heads, asking why we’d undertake such a thing. Here’s our answer to that, plus some interesting technical challenges we ran into and how we tackled them.