SmartBear Software is an American privately-held

information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

company that delivers tools for application performance monitoring (APM),

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

software testing Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations. Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the Quality (business), quality of software and the risk of its failure to a User (computin ...

API testing API testing is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.< ...

and

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

management. The company is based in Assembly Square in Somerville in the

Greater Boston Area Greater Boston is the metropolitan region of New England encompassing the municipality of Boston, the capital of the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the most populous city in New England, and its surrounding areas, home to 4,941,632. The most ...

. The company was founded in 2009 when SmartBear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software were acquired by Insight Venture Partners.

History and founding

The original Smart Bear company was founded by Jason Cohen in 2003.

Insight Venture Partners Insight Venture Management, LLC (commonly referred to as Insight Partners and previously Insight Venture Partners) is a global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology, software, and internet businesses. The ...

acquired three companies, Smart Bear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software, between 2007 and early 2009. These companies operated as AQA Holdings until being rebranded as SmartBear Software in 2010. After the rebranding, the company acquired Eviware in 2011, leading to API promoter and SoapUI's founder, Ole Lensmar, joining the company. He later served as chief technology officer (CTO) of SmartBear. That same year, the company acquired APM vendor AlertSite. In 2013 SmartBear acquired Spanish APM vendor Lucierna. SmartBear then acquired the Open-Source Community Swagger in 2015 and its founder, Tony Tam, joined the company as head of products for Swagger and the commercial version of Swagger, SwaggerHub. In 2016, SmartBear acquired CrossBrowserTesting.com (CBT) and Ken Hamric, founder of CBT, joined the company as general manager of CrossBrowserTesting.com. In 2017,

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners Management, L.P., doing business as Francisco Partners, is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. It was founded in August 1999 and based in ...

acquired a majority stake in SmartBear Software.

AutomatedQA

AutomatedQA Corporation specialized in automated

tools and developer tools. It was founded in 1999 in

Las Vegas Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...

. The company's first product was AQtime, a binary instrumentation profiler to help optimize performance for

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

developed with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

compilers. It was released on November 12, 1999. The first version of TestComplete, AutomatedQA's automated software testing tool, was released in December 2000. In 2004, AutomatedQA released Automated Build Studio, an automated build management and continuous integration application. AQtrace, a new product by AutomatedQA, was released in June 2008. AutomatedQA had received an SD Times 100 award three times, including the most recent SD Times 100 list for 2008. The SD Times 100 award honors the top 100 leaders and innovators in the

industry as judged by ''SD Times'' magazine. AutomatedQA remained an independent subsidiary of SmartBear from 2007 to 2010 until being merged into SmartBear Software.

Company

SmartBear is based in the

and has U.S. offices in

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

, and

Florida Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...

. SmartBear also has offices and development centers in Ireland, India, Finland, Poland, Melbourne, and Sweden. Frank Roe became chief executive in March 2020. SmartBear Software offers products in the following categories:

lifecycle,

automated testing In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive bu ...

, behaviour-driven development (BDD),

test management Test management most commonly refers to the activity of managing a testing process. A test management tool is software used to manage tests (automated or manual) that have been previously specified by a test procedure. It is often associated with ...

, performance testing, mobile testing, monitoring,

code review Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or more people examine the source code of a computer program, either after implementation or during the development process. The persons perf ...

, and three

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

tools.

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.smartbear.com Cloud applications Cloud computing providers Software companies based in Massachusetts Software performance management Technology companies based in the Boston area Software companies established in 2009 Companies based in Middlesex County, Massachusetts Somerville, Massachusetts 2009 establishments in Massachusetts Software companies of the United States