SmartBear provides software development tools spanning API lifecycle management, test automation, test management and quality governance, and production observability. Its portfolio is unified through the SmartBear Application Integrity Core, which connects the API catalog and test repository as a foundation for software quality. Pulse 2.0 interviewed SmartBear CEO Dan Faulkner to learn more.
Dan Faulkner’s Background And Responsibilities
When asked about his background and responsibilities as SmartBear’s CEO, Faulkner shared:
My background spans product leadership, operational management, and global strategy, including heading up multiple enterprise-level acquisitions and building go-to-market strategies at scale. I joined SmartBear in 2021 as Chief Product Officer, led our product strategy, and stepped into the CEO role in January 2025.
As CEO, my focus is on ensuring SmartBear continues to help our customers build software with confidence, removing friction, embedding AI where it genuinely moves the needle, and making sure the tools teams rely on keep pace with the speed of modern development.
Core Products And Features
When describing SmartBear’s core products and capabilities, Faulkner detailed:
At the foundation, everything we build delivers application integrity, continuous, measurable assurance that your software works as intended, with the governance to operate at AI speed and scale. Our portfolio spans four areas: API lifecycle management, test automation, test management and quality governance, and production observability. Products like BearQ, Swagger, ReadyAPI, TestComplete, Reflect, Zephyr, QMetry, BugSnag, and AlertSite each address a distinct part of the software development lifecycle, unified by the SmartBear Application Integrity Core, the foundation that connects the API catalog and test repository as the ground truth for software quality.
What makes that meaningful in practice is how these tools fit into the way teams already work. They embed into existing continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, support cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, and scale with teams whether they’re in early automation or running advanced DevOps workflows. We’re trusted by more than 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers across 32,000 organizations, including Adobe, JetBlue, and Microsoft.
Technology Evolution And BearQ
When discussing how SmartBear’s technology has evolved and its most significant recent milestone, Faulkner described:
For a long time, software quality meant static test scripts, point-in-time audits, and documentation that was outdated the moment it was published. The tools were good, but they were built for a pace of development that no longer exists. AI has accelerated coding dramatically, but traditional testing methods haven’t kept up, and that gap is becoming a real bottleneck for teams trying to maintain application integrity. Our own research found that seven out of 10 software and quality assurance professionals are already concerned that quality is suffering in the age of AI-driven software development lifecycles.
SmartBear BearQ is our most significant recent milestone and our direct answer to this problem. It’s an agentic quality assurance system with always-on teammates that autonomously explore, learn, and test applications, shifting the industry’s focus from “Does the code work?” to “Does the application actually deliver the intended experience?” It’s the clearest expression of what we’ve been working toward: a shift from tools that support testing to a system that delivers continuous, measurable assurance automatically.
Customer Success Stories
When invited to share customer success stories that demonstrate application integrity across the software lifecycle, Faulkner highlighted:
A few come to mind that illustrate what application integrity looks like when it’s working across the lifecycle. NISC is one example. A technology cooperative serving more than 1,000 rural energy and communications companies, it had no reliable way to govern what its APIs were supposed to do or communicate that intent to its member community. By adopting Swagger, it established a single source of truth for API governance and documentation, replacing static PDFs with real-time, governed specifications that teams and members could actually trust. That’s intent defined and enforced at the API layer, which is where application integrity has to start.
TELUS used Reflect to move from manual, script-based testing toward continuous validation of real user workflows. In 18 weeks, it automated what would have taken two years, more than 1,200 test cases and a 95% productivity increase, with self-healing tests that minimized upkeep and kept coverage sustainable as its applications evolved.
HotelTonight is a strong example of production integrity in practice. Its business depends entirely on mobile applications behaving reliably in real-world conditions. Using BugSnag, it reduced bug resolution time by 60% and consistently held to a strict 1% error budget, building a measurable, data-driven system for understanding how its application was actually performing for customers.
SmartBear’s Differentiators
When asked what differentiates SmartBear from its competition, Faulkner emphasized:
Application integrity. Most vendors in this space give you tools that solve for a specific moment in the development lifecycle, such as a test runner, an API linter, or an error monitor. We deliver continuous, measurable assurance across all of it, with the governance to keep pace with how fast software is being built today. That’s a fundamentally different promise, and it’s one we can actually keep because our portfolio spans the entire lifecycle, unified on a single foundation.
The other differentiator is trust. We’re not an AI-first startup making bold claims without a track record. The tools in our portfolio have been trusted by developers and testers for decades across some of the most demanding environments in the industry. That credibility is what gives teams the confidence to adopt new capabilities without having to gamble on an unproven vendor.
Responding To AI-Driven Development
When asked about recent challenges in the software development sector and how SmartBear has responded, Faulkner acknowledged:
AI has created enormous opportunities for software teams, but it’s also created genuine pressure. The expectation to move faster across the entire software development lifecycle, from API design through production, without sacrificing reliability, has never been greater. What we hear from customers is that the tools they’ve relied on for years are struggling to keep pace. As a result, maintaining confidence in what you’re releasing, when the pace of change is this relentless, is harder than it’s ever been.
Our response has been to invest ahead of that curve rather than react to it. That means building capabilities that don’t just assist testing but take it on autonomously, and doing that in a way that integrates with how teams already work rather than asking them to start over. The industry is still mid-transition, and we don’t think the answer is to wait for things to stabilize. The teams that come out ahead will be the ones that used this moment to build quality into the foundation, not bolt it on at the end.
Future Goals
When discussing SmartBear’s future goals, Faulkner concluded:
The way I think about it is simple. We want to be the company that solved the quality problem for the AI era. That’s a high bar, but it’s the right one. Software is increasingly written, reviewed, and deployed with AI assistance, which means the systems we use to validate it have to be just as intelligent and just as continuous.
In the near term, that means expanding what autonomous testing can do and deepening our coverage across the full software development lifecycle. Longer term, it’s about giving teams and the AI agents increasingly working alongside them a reliable, governed foundation to build on. For any organization that builds software, application integrity is becoming a baseline requirement. Our goal is to make sure SmartBear is the partner that gets them there and stays there.
