December 19th, 2025 by Kendra Stansel
The pace of change in technology has never been faster, and our recent webinar, "How AI-Powered Testing Can Transform Your QA Process," proved just how rapidly the software landscape is being reshaped. This recap explores the future of Quality Assurance (QA) in an era where AI agents are doing the coding. We reveal why the push for speed has led to a dangerous collapse in software quality, detail the critical shift toward Spec-Based Development—where robust requirements management becomes the most vital discipline—and show how Inflectra is using native AI in Spira and Rapise to empower human QA teams to manage risk and restore quality.
In this recap of our latest webinar, CEO Adam Sandman provided an insightful look into the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in software development, detailing the shift towards agentic AI and its profound implications for QA.
Recording
The Three Phases of AI Evolution
The journey of AI is quickly moving through three phases:
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Phase 1: The Digital Intern (LLMs, Prompt Engineering): AI acts as a content generator (e.g., code snippets). It has no agency.
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Phase 2: The Digital Employee (LAMs, LVMs): AI gains agency—it can "see" and "do" things (e.g., click, understand an image). This enables Agentic AI.
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Phase 3: Teams of Agents (MCP): Agents work collaboratively across the lifecycle (Dev Agent $\leftrightarrow$ Testing Agent) to accomplish business goals.
The Great Software Quality Collapse
While AI promises speed, it introduces a significant quality trade-off:
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Productivity Up, Quality Down: A roughly 300% increase in productivity is met with a corresponding 400% decrease in quality.
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Security Risks: AI-generated code is reported to contain 322% more vulnerabilities than human-written code.
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Non-Deterministic Systems: Generative AI introduces non-deterministic behavior, meaning small, catastrophic failures can occur even after extensive testing.
The Return of the Requirements: Spec-Based Development
To counter "Vibe Coding" (simple prompts that lead to maintainability issues), the industry is shifting to Spec-Based Coding.
The core idea is: The Specification (Spec) is the source of truth. The AI Agent builds the application to the detailed, version-controlled spec (requirements, design files, tasks). This enables successful development on large, existing codebases.
The human developer's role shifts from writing code to ensuring high-quality documentation and architectural governance.
Inflectra AI in Action: The New Flow for Quality
The new flow requires shifting the source of truth upstream to the specification:
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User Input (Spec): Humans create rich artifacts (requirements, test cases).
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AI Generation: The Dev Agent generates code from the spec.
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Testing/Fixing: Testing agents run tests from the spec and find issues.
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Refine Spec (Not Code): When a bug is found, the human and AI fix the spec, ensuring consistency.
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Regenerate: The refined spec is used to regenerate the application.
Inflectra plays a critical role in this new process:
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Inflectra Spira: Manages the Requirements and Spec Creation piece, serving as the source of truth. AI features assist in backlog generation, requirement quality scoring, and risk/task generation.
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Inflectra Rapise: Provides the Test Execution piece. AI features convert manual steps to automation, build maintainable tests using existing frameworks, and perform qualitative assessments (e.g., checking for good contrast or white space).
The Future: Self-Healing and Assurance
Inflectra's roadmap includes:
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Self-Healing Tests: Rapise will use its vision model to visually identify UI elements and automatically relearn their technical locators when they change, preventing test failures.
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Inflectra Assure: A brand new product focused on Agentic Testing specifically designed to test AI systems themselves.
The convergence of Agentic AI and spec-based development underscores the indispensable role of the quality professional in ensuring safety and reliability.
Your Future in QA: Join the Conversation
The shift to Agentic AI is happening now, and the role of the quality professional has never been more critical.
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