The SmartBear story has some interesting twists and turns, but follows one story line: providing the best tools to software development teams that care about software quality and performance - in a way that is affordable, free to try and with great support.

Our story starts – probably not surprisingly – with a bunch of developers setting out to build better, less expensive tools. They saw the market saturated with large suites that were hard to implement and required big up-front investments. They felt that there had to be a better way. AutomatedQA was born, building a great set of highly functional tools for testers and developers that didn’t need a huge chunk of IT budget to be purchased. As the young company was looking for ways to reach a broader community of users, they needed somebody with the right market experience to get the word out. They teamed up with Derek Langone who became the company’s president, because of his track record of bringing other affordable software tools to market without making them into just another expensive budget item for the CIO.

After the AutomatedQA community began to grow and products like TestComplete gained a large fan base of individual users and QA teams with its automated testing features, Derek met Jason Cohen, the founder of the original Smart Bear Software. Jason had already made a name for himself in the development community with the idea of a completely new type of collaborative tool for lightweight peer code review which proved to be a powerful concept and attracted a lot of interest by many different development teams. Jason and Derek discovered that the two companies had complementary tools and shared a common vision around improving software quality. They decided to join forces, bring the companies together and apply the same principles of best of breed tools that are easy to try and affordable to purchase, quickly attracting an ever increasing community of users.

The story continues – Derek and Jason had been partnering with Steve Miller who had a leading test management, requirements management, issue tracking and development management tool that was also easily accessible by small teams on demand, through the SaaS-based model. As a result of the success they had been having in the marketplace, the three decided to add Steve’s business to the team.

Now with three business units and a worldwide community of over 100,000, our users were looking for ways to better work together across products and take advantage of their vast network of peers. While thinking about how to best address our users’ needs and bring together the three units, Derek met another visionary in the QA and development space. Joe Krivickas, who began his career as a software developer, was the CEO of Segue Software and led its Silk technology to become used by tens of thousands of development teams. Joe helped create over 2,000 jobs within a number of great software companies where he was President or CEO. If you ask him what he cares most about, he will tell you it is software quality and helping to build great teams. He will also tell you that he felt the Borland takeover of Segue didn’t allow him to finish what he started.

Joe now saw an opportunity to pick up where he had left off and asked his Segue-collaborator Ian McLeod, the previous head of R&D at Segue, to join Derek, Jason, Steve and him to help build a great new company focused on software quality – 100% focused on serving the needs of this community of developers and testers.