SmartBear Advances TestComplete with Vision AI, Enabling Automated Testing for Highly Critical Visual Applications

New visual object detection capability increases test coverage, reduces risk, and provides an industry-first approach comparable to human perception

SOMERVILLE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SmartBear, helping teams build, test, and ship quality software at AI speed and scale, today announced the first platform to unify property-based, OCR, and vision AI — expanding coverage, reducing risk, and perceiving applications the way humans do. This functionality will automate testing of highly visual applications that are traditionally tested manually because of their complexity, leading to poorer coverage and increased risk exposure.

Automating testing of all applications is increasingly important as AI accelerates code and application creation. The TestComplete enhancement will be especially beneficial for business-critical applications, including 3D applications like CAD, canvas-based applications like Google Maps, virtualized environments like Citrix, and for desktop and complex web applications that feature complex graphs and charts like Tableau, SAP, and Oracle.

Without automated testing of highly visual applications, new application releases or updates may be delayed. More likely, manual testing will result in releases that are tested less rigorously because of pressure to get applications to market. This builds company-wide risk. When a critical business application, like a financial chart or graph does not work as it's supposed to, business analysis may be delayed or, worse, information used to make decisions can be misrepresented.

“AI is writing code faster than humans or traditional automation can test it and visual applications are the last frontier where automated testing has failed to work,” said Prashant Mohan, vice president of product at SmartBear. “TestComplete now helps close the testing gap created by AI by adding vision AI, enabling teams to finally automate testing where they need it most: in visual business-critical applications to reduce risk and broaden test coverage.”

TestComplete now provides an industry-first visual object detection approach comparable to human perception, as opposed to competing solutions that can only use AI for web testing. Its advantage is its flexible object recognition: teams can capture and identify objects through multiple methods, helping them test across diverse application technologies and complex UIs more reliably than tools with narrower recognition approaches. Adding vision AI makes this case even stronger by expanding TestComplete’s ability to recognize UI elements visually when traditional object properties are limited, unstable, or unavailable. It evaluates applications the way a human eye would, rather than by replicating code-based properties.

This approach makes tests more resilient to subtle application changes, producing more stable tests and greater release confidence. Also, because TestComplete tests how an application is supposed to behave, rather than how its underlying code is supposed to function, test maintenance becomes easier. Teams can automate regression tests and keep pace with application changes without extensive code revisions–which is a huge time saver and competitive advantage.

With TestComplete’s expanded automated test coverage and streamlined maintenance, testing teams can accelerate release velocity and focus on quality rather than code revision — a critical advantage as AI-driven development increases the pace of application delivery.

The new capability complements existing TestComplete object recognition features — including property-based and text extraction — to deliver the most comprehensive automated test coverage in the market. This enhancement to TestComplete is available today and part of SmartBear's broader commitment to delivering AI-powered innovation across the entire software development lifecycle. TestComplete is a core component of SmartBear’s integrated solution for managing, automating, and executing all tests in one place to help customers achieve application integrity.

Click here to learn more about visual object detection.

About SmartBear
SmartBear delivers application integrity for modern tech stacks, ensuring continuous, measurable assurance that software just works as intended – with governance to operate at AI speed and scale. SmartBear offers deep test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability capabilities. With integrations across the SDLC, it sets a new quality standard for application delivery teams.

SmartBear is trusted by more than 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers across 32,000 organizations, including 75% of the largest financial institutions and industry leaders such as Adobe, JetBlue, and Microsoft. SmartBear’s best-loved brands include Swagger, TestComplete, Reflect, QMetry, Zephyr, and more. As stewards of a collaborative open source community, SmartBear meets customers where they are to make our technology-driven world a better place. Learn more at www.smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, X, and Reddit.