Market-Speed Delivery Requires Quality-First Engineering

InnovationMarket-Speed Delivery Requires Quality-First EngineeringByAsad Khan,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 26, 2026, 10:15am EDTAsad Khan is the Co-Founder & CEO of TestMu AI, an AI-native unified enterprise test execution cloud platform. gettyFor years, the software industry has treated speed and quality as a trade-off, where going faster implies accepting lower quality, and believing that investing more in quality could slow the organization down.That thinking doesn't hold up anymore. Companies must now figure out how to excel at speed without compromising quality.Vibe coding is helping teams build faster than ever, but there is no short way to evaluate quality in this environment, leaving a huge blind spot.The new development mindset demands new quality engineering (QE).The True Cost When Quality Lags SpeedThere are countless examples of brands having to pay a huge toll for negligence in quality.​ In fact, poor software quality cost U.S. businesses $2.41 trillion in 2022, according to the Consortium for Information & Software Quality.The customer impact can be immediate and unforgiving. Globally, according to PwC research, nearly a third of customers "would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience."As organizations integrate AI into their development and testing workflows, customer-centric quality must remain the priority, and the bar is rising faster than most QE processes can adapt.If your quality controls are slower than your operations, you're creating compliance gaps that no amount of speed-to-market can justify.Where AI Is Reshaping Quality Engineering if (!window.cnxel) { window.cnxel = {}; window.cnxel.cmd = []; var iframe = document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.style.display = 'none'; iframe.onload = function() { var iframeDoc =...