#332 Dan Faulkner: The Code Is Clean. The App Is Broken. Why AI Development Has an Integrity Problem

My name is Dan Faulkner. I'm the CEO of SmartBear. I joined SmartBear about five years ago initially as the chief product and technology officer. I've been the, CEO since, the 2025. Prior to joining SmartBear, I was, at a a small MarTech startup called Planner, which we sold where I was the CTO. Prior to that, I spent most of my career working for a company called Nuance Communications, which was one of the pioneers in in really field hardening speech technology and and making that work well for real people in in real world environments. Now what we do at SmartBear is we provide tools for development teams to improve the quality of their applications. We do that in two primary domains. The first is in application, testing. So that means testing applications above the waterline of the code, the actual Mhmm. Real application in its real deployment environment and in API life cycle management. So APIs obviously are now the vocabulary of agents, So they've become even more important than they were, and they were critical anyway. So they're the two main areas that we we focus our product investment into. Yeah. And did you say, testing APIs or configuring APIs? It's the full life cycle management. So, our our product is built on top of a very well known open source, product called Swagger, which, is essentially the codification of the, OpenAPI standard. And, the commercial product that sits on top of that is, an API catalog that manages all the artifacts across the life cycle. So the specification, its documentation, and tests all of them. So the contract testing, the functional testing, performance testing, and so on of APIs. So you can kind of keep that API catalog well governed and and up to speed. Yeah. And as you said, API is getting more important, because of the explosion or what's anticipated as an explosion of, AgenTek AI, that's that's connecting and calling APIs for tools or databases or things like that. It as AI increases software production, the the velocity, the speed of software production, if application level validation doesn't in scale alongside it, are we increasing systemic digital risk? This is something I've spoken to a few people about. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly what we believe, that there are pillars throughout the SDLC are resilient, and meaning they will still be there in the AI disrupted SDLC, and those are failing to keep pace with the acceleration encoding. One of those pillars is application testing. There are others like security and monitoring, you know, even strategy and requirements creation and definition. Those things all still need to be done, and coding specifically has accelerated way past the capabilities of what those pillars have been able to do. And, the risk that that creates, kind of the systemic risk, is that, the the vocabulary we use to describe it is you lose the integrity. You risk losing the integrity of your applications. And …