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SD Times News Roundup — Sept. 16, 2026: SmartBear, Anthropic, VerseBlocks

SmartBear has made its BearQ agentic QA system available as an assignable testing agent in Atlassian Jira, following BearQ's March launch, letting teams set autonomy levels for autonomous testing of agentic software development. Anthropic merged Claude Cowork and Chat so Claude Design now works inside conversations, with document and slide drafting in beta on paid plans and Enterprise admins controlling activation. VerseBlocks released VerseDocs on Microsoft AppSource, generating Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents from Microsoft Dataverse records entirely in-tenant via sandboxed plug-ins, with 69 Power Automate actions and no per-document metering.

read2 min views1 publishedSep 16, 2026
SD Times News Roundup — Sept. 16, 2026: SmartBear, Anthropic, VerseBlocks
Image: Sdtimes (auto-discovered)
SmartBear’s BearQ Agent Powers Autonomous Testing in Jira

BearQ is a new assignable testing agent in Jira that autonomously tests agentic software development. BearQ, is now available as an assignable agent in Atlassian.

“Jira is where work gets defined, and assignable agents help carry it out across the SDLC,” said Alan Braun, Head of Product Ecosystem at Atlassian. “BearQ is built specifically for testing, exploring the application the way a person would, rather than solely reviewing the code underneath it. As testing grows more complex, that’s what helps teams ship faster and safer.”

As an assignable agent, BearQ embeds testing into the AI SDLC workflows teams have in Jira. When assigned a work item, BearQ will understand the context of new application capabilities, validate, and adapt testing around real user journeys, reducing the script maintenance that slows QA down. Teams set the autonomy level to meet their desired level of human oversight. As a result, QA scales to keep pace with AI-development, but teams retain control, and BearQ agents act as QA teammates while humans review what gets trusted to agents.

BearQ launched in March as SmartBear’s agentic QA system to help teams keep up with AI-code development and ensure application integrity.

Claude Cowork, Chat are now one

Claude Designnow works inside your conversations too. Ask for a document, and you and Claude write it together. Ask for a presentation, and Claude drafts the slides. You can edit directly, present straight from Claude, or download as PowerPoint or PDF. All three are in beta on paid plans, and Enterprise admins choose when to turn them on. If you use Claude Design on its own, it keeps working as before.

Anthropic blog. VerseDocs brings in-tenant document generation to Microsoft Dataverse

VerseBlocks’ VerseDocs, available on Microsoft AppSource, generates Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents from Dataverse records entirely inside the customer’s own Power Platform environment, with no external rendering service, no Azure resources and no per-document metering.

VerseDocs runs as sandboxed plug-ins in the Dataverse environment itself. Document content, template content, field values and file names never leave the tenant, which removes the data-residency and sub-processor questions that document generation usually raises in regulated organizations.

The product installs as a single managed solution and adds a Generate document button to any table an administrator enables, plus 69 actions to Power Automate exposed as standard Dataverse custom APIs. Templates are ordinary Word, Excel and PowerPoint files with tokens; they support repeating rows, conditional sections, images, nested child records and in-template totals. PDF conversion, merge, split, watermarking, PDF/A archival output and digital signing with the customer’s own certificate are included.

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