DeviQA unveils the first industry report on AI-generated code from the QA perspective, highlighting its impact on software quality and testing.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, July 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- DeviQA, a pure-play QA and software testing company today released State of AI-Generated Code: The QA and Testing Gap 2026 — an industry research report based on a proprietary survey of 300 QA engineers, SDETs, and test leads.

Every major report on AI-assisted development — GitHub Octoverse, Stack Overflow Developer Survey, DORA, JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem — is written from the developer's seat. This report is written from the seat of the QA engineer who inherits what developers ship. It is the first sizeable industry study to ask that question at scale.

The Five Numbers

The report's executive summary opens with five findings it calls the second half of the ledger:
- 65% of QA respondents work with development teams that actively use AI to generate code. Another 16% report occasional use. AI-authored code is now the default input to testing, not the exception.
- 52% report that bug volume has increased since developers began using AI. Only 2% report a decrease.
- 58% report that their own testing workload has grown. No respondent described additional QA headcount being added in response.
- 0 of 300 respondents gave AI-generated code a full trust rating on a five-point scale. Mean trust across all respondents: 3.16 out of 5.
- 91% — the increase in pull request review time in AI-adopting teams, per LinearB's dataset of 8.1 million pull requests across 4,800 organizations. AI-authored PRs wait 4.6 times longer for reviewer pickup than human-authored ones. QA is absorbing the review deficit downstream.

What the Report Documents

The Testing Gap 2026 report covers eight sections, moving from adoption patterns through defect anatomy, security exposure, review dynamics, and operational recommendations.

On defect types, the QA-reported taxonomy is dominated by logical errors (58% of substantive respondents), unhandled edge cases (52%), duplicated or redundant code (42%), and non-compliance with requirements (42%). These are structurally the defects that pass syntax checks, pass linters, and reveal themselves only under structured test execution — the categories QA is positioned to catch and the ones that developer-facing research does not measure.

On security, the report draws a deliberate distinction: only 10% of QA respondents named security vulnerabilities among their top defect categories, not because AI-generated code is secure — external research documents vulnerability rates as high as 45% in benchmark studies — but because QA is not designed or staffed to be the security net. The report states this plainly and frames it as a role-clarification finding with direct implications for AppSec investment in AI-adopting organizations.

On the review process, the report surfaces a pattern its respondents describe as the regression amplifier: AI-authored changes producing failures in areas the change did not appear to touch. Multiple QA respondents describe expanding regression scope to areas that previously required only smoke testing, precisely because of this downstream instability.

Methodology

The report is based on a proprietary survey of 300 QA practitioners fielded in 2026 through DeviQA's internal QA network. The sample is composed of 40% Automation QA, 40% Manual QA, and 20% SDET, weighted toward senior experience: 26% of respondents have 8 or more years of experience, and 26% have 5–8 years. Participation was voluntary and uncompensated. All external statistics cited in the report are linked to primary sources; all data gaps in the proprietary survey are named explicitly.

The full report is available via the link.

About DeviQA

DeviQA is a pure-play quality engineering firm founded in 2010, recognized as one of the top-rated QA and software testing providers globally. With an exclusive focus on software quality — and a team of 300+ QA engineers, SDETs, and automation specialists distributed across six offices worldwide — DeviQA functions as a strategic testing partner to technology-led organizations across fintech, healthcare, enterprise SaaS, and e-commerce. Its practice covers the full quality lifecycle: functional and regression testing, test automation architecture, performance and load engineering, security testing, and AI/ML validation. DeviQA is a Clutch 1000 honoree and a G2-recognized leader in Testing and QA for Winter 2026.

Oleg Sadikov
Flyant SL
+1 805-491-9331
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