Honoring Absa: Achieving 96% less test creation time with SmartBear QMetry and SmartBear Reflect

At SmartBear, we’re dedicated to empowering teams by delivering application integrity: continuous, measurable assurance that their software works as intended, even as AI accelerates the SDLC. The AI Test Innovators Award: QMetry + Reflect celebrates customers who are using AI to reimagine how they create, maintain, and manage tests – without sacrificing rigor or reliability. 

This quarter, we’re honoring Absa, a leading financial services group serving more than 12 million customers, for embedding AI-assisted test case generation, self-healing automation, and AI-powered defect insights into SmartBear QMetry and SmartBear Reflect across its banking platform. In just months, Absa’s QA team turned a slow, largely manual, and difficult-to-audit process into a fast, integrated, and fully traceable one – cutting test case creation time from three days to about an hour – quality that keeps pace at AI speed and scale. 

Absa drives AI-driven test management excellence in test creation & analysis 

Absa runs banking, insurance, and wealth platforms across a dozen African markets, which means every release it ships has to be provable to internal risk teams and external auditors, not just tested. But Absa’s QA team was managing testing through a developer-focused tool with no structured way to organize test cases or satisfy those audit requirements. After migrating its test library into QMetry, now serving as its testing system of record, the Absa team adopted AI-assisted test case generation – feeding acceptance criteria to QMetry’s AI capabilities and receiving structured positive and negative test cases in return. On the automation side, the team connected Copado, a native DevOps and release management platform for Salesforce, to QMetry so failed tests automatically generate tracked defects, and relied on Copado’s AI assistance to troubleshoot failing scripts and speed up root-cause analysis. Layered on top, Reflect’s AI-assisted test creation and self-healing capabilities keep automated tests running through routine UI changes, while Jira integration and severity-based alerts hold developers and scrum masters accountable for critical and major defects. 

From three days to one hour: What Absa gained with Reflect and QMetry

Using Reflect and QMetry, Absa now has measurable assurance across every release, resulting in:  

• ~96% reduction in test case creation and analysis time – from three days down to about one hour 
• Full audit-ready traceability across test cases, defects, and requirements for every regression cycle 
• Faster defect resolution through automated, severity-based alerts to developers and scrum masters 
• Greater stakeholder and auditor confidence, with real-time pass/fail dashboards now driving release sign-off 

Responsible AI adoption with human guidance 

Absa’s team didn’t adopt AI-generated testing blindly. Some team members were initially skeptical of AI-written test cases, and it took encouragement from QA leadership – and a real learning curve around how to prompt the AI effectively – before the team trusted it as part of their workflow. That hands-on, human-guided approach is central to how Abongile Goci, QA manager at Absa, describes the value of AI on her team: it acts, in her words, as “that mentor that’s there, but you just tell it the issue, and it gives you a solution” – without replacing the judgment of the QA engineers reviewing its output. 

We as humans, we get tired sometimes, and then we get frustrated, and also we get overwhelmed. With AI capability, you’re able to share the issues you experience and it gives you a suggestion – it’s like that mentor that’s right there, but it also upskills you.

Abongile Goci, QA manager, Absa 

This is the balance responsible AI adoption depends on: autonomy where it saves time, human oversight where it matters. Absa scaled AI-assisted testing without ever taking QA engineers out of the loop. 

Another round of applause for Absa 

We’re inspired by Absa’s demonstration that AI and human expertise, applied together, can turn a slow, hard-to-audit testing process into a fast and fully traceable one. Congratulations to Absa and the entire QA team on winning the AI Test Innovators Award: QMetry + Reflect. 

Learn more about SmartBear’s AI Test Innovation Award and how teams are redefining what’s possible with AI, and start a free trial of QMetry or Reflect to explore these capabilities for yourself.