Why Software Testing Is Broken (and How We’re Fixing It)

Our Journey Began Here

We kicked off in a startup pre‑accelerator, interviewing devs, QA engineers, team leads, and managers at JetBrains, Stripe, Deloitte, Adobe, NXP, MassMutual, LSEG, Pentest Tools, and AD/01.

What we heard was loud and clear: the bottleneck wasn’t QA teams—it was the developers themselves losing time to inefficient testing workflows.

“We waste 2–3 days just waiting for manual testers to verify edge cases”

Testing wasn’t just slow—it was demoralizing. Teams were shipping untested features under pressure, and when things broke, trust broke too.

So we dove deep into research, mapping every step of the testing journey—from setup and scripting to verification and maintenance. Each conversation sharpened our vision: we wouldn’t build another brittle tool, but an AI‑powered partner that learns from your code.

This journey isn’t just ours—it’s yours too. And it’s only just beginning.

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Testing is an Investment

Testing isn’t a luxury - it’s your insurance against costly failures. Industry best practice recommends at least 90% unit‑test coverage to catch regressions before they hit production. Yet too many teams view tests as overhead instead of a critical safeguard.

Great tests speed you up in the long run. They enable safe refactoring, faster onboarding, and confident deploys. They help teams scale without slowing down.

Investing in testing is investing in your team’s velocity, your product’s reliability, and your customers’ trust.

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Key Findings from Our Research

• Teams report spending up to 50% of their time on tests—but only 12% of that is genuine automation.

• 2–3 day delays waiting on manual QA are par for the course.

• Tight deadlines lead to rushed tests that miss edge cases and introduce new bugs.

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Lessons from Real Failures

In June 2024, a faulty update in CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform triggered Blue Screens of Death on millions of Windows machines worldwide.

NASA’s Mariner 1 rocket exploded just minutes after takeoff—all because of a single missing hyphen in the code.

Even critical systems fail when testing’s left to chance - Boeing’s 737 MAX MCAS relied on a single untested sensor scenario, leading to two fatal crashes and 346 lives lost. These incidents show that incomplete or manual tests can cascade into global crises.

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Introducing GenTest - The Solution

At GenTest, we’re building an AI-powered CLI that writes unit and integration tests in seconds.
No more wasting days on setup, writing tests, or handling edge cases manually.

GenTest connects with your CI/CD pipeline and understands your code to generate meaningful, accurate tests—fast.
You stay focused on features. We handle the repetitive testing work.

Right now, we’re in the research phase—talking to developers, managers, and tech leads to deeply understand their testing pain points.

We’re not finished yet, but we’re moving fast—and we’d love your input as we build.

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Conclusion

Testing is supposed to make software safer. But when it takes days to run, costs velocity, and misses real bugs anyway—it’s a bottleneck, not a safety net.
CrowdStrike’s outage and Boeing’s MCAS disaster prove reliable tests are critical.
GenTest automates tests in seconds, making testing your advantage.

Try GenTest at gentest.dev.

What’s the biggest testing headache you’d love to eliminate?