Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Is agentic AI testing more hype than substance? Clarifying what this category of software testing actually is, how it works in practice, and where it still falls short.

In February, two CNBC journalists built a replica of Monday.com’s interface using Claude Code with no prior developer experience and less than $20 in credits. Software stocks at the time were already wobbly, with investors fearing that AI could erode seat-based pricing and undercut proprietary UI. To some, the CNBC news confirmed the speculation.

In this guest post, Intellyx Principal Analyst Jason English explores what it takes to level up quality engineering in the age of agentic AI, and why visibility, context, and governance are the keys to getting there. One day in an agentic developer’s life: Developer “CodeBud agent, create me a suite of test cases to validate the feature you just built.” CodeBud Done. Test suite created.

Performance testing is a critical safeguard for any software team, but even experienced practitioners can fall into familiar traps. Overlooked bottlenecks, missing test scenarios, or environments that don’t reflect production realities can all lead to slowdowns, user frustration, and lost business. The most damaging mistakes are often the ones that become invisible through routine or assumption.

If you run a platform tools or security team, you have likely heard this request from developers: “I just need a copy of the production database for staging so I can run realistic load and integration tests.” It is a completely reasonable request. Production traffic and data contain the actual request shapes, real-world value distributions, long-tail anomalies, and timing patterns that make tests useful.

The conversation around AI validation has rapidly outgrown simple prompt engineering and single-turn model checks. While the industry spent the last few years establishing baseline protocols for individual AI agent testing, enterprise automation has already advanced to the next engineering frontier: the Multi-Agent System (MAS).

API testing has become one of the highest-value activities a QA team can invest in. Because APIs operate at the business logic layer, below the user interface and above the database, tests written there are faster to execute, more stable across releases, and far cheaper to maintain than their UI counterparts. In the test pyramid, API tests occupy the middle tier: broader than unit tests, but a fraction of the cost of end-to-end UI suites.

The first time I watched a deployment take down a production app, I was a junior engineer with no idea what a deployment strategy actually was. I assumed "deploying" just meant pushing code and refreshing the page. Deployment strategies are the structured approaches development teams use to release software updates into production, defining how, when, and how safely code moves from a repository into the hands of real users.