As we step into 2026, Manchester Digital is proud to launch Picturing 2026 - a new series of essays from our members exploring the tech trends, opportunities and challenges shaping the year ahead.
In this piece, Planit reflect on how Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering are evolving from traditional gatekeeping into a central role in building digital trust.
As we stand at the start of 2026, the digital landscape in the UK—and specifically within Greater Manchester’s thriving tech hub—has moved past the initial "AI hype" into a period of rigorous, outcome-driven implementation. For those of us in Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Engineering (QE), the conversation has fundamentally shifted. We are no longer the "gatekeepers" at the end of a sprint; we are the architects of digital trust.
Here is how the landscape of 2026 is redefining our sector.
In 2024, we talked about AI-assisted coding. In 2026, we are living in the era of Agentic Quality Engineering. We have moved beyond static automation scripts that break with every UI tweak. Today’s QE frameworks utilise autonomous agents capable of "reasoning" through changes, self-healing test suites, and generating synthetic data that mimics complex user personas in real-time.
The challenge is no longer "How do we automate this?" but "How do we govern the agents doing the testing?" QE professionals have pivoted into Orchestrators, managing a quality engineering layer that routes work across systems and identifies edge cases that require human judgment.
The industry has finally abandoned the vanity metric of ‘90% code coverage.’ Driven by UK policy shifts and the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, boards now demand evidence of Risk-Based Assurance.
With the proliferation of AI-generated code, the volume of software being produced is too vast for blanket testing. In 2026, the most successful businesses are those focusing their QE efforts on the 20% of the estate that carries 80% of the operational and regulatory risk. Quality is now measured by Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) and Resilience Scores rather than just bug counts.
Manchester’s digital ecosystem, now on its way to becoming a £7bn powerhouse, has carved out a unique niche. With the maturation of ID Manchester and our growing innovation districts, the city is leading the way in ‘Inclusive Quality.’
However, we aren't just testing for functionality; we are testing for social accessibility. As Greater Manchester pushes for 100% digital inclusion, local QE teams need to be at the forefront of ensuring that public services and private platforms are usable by everyone - regardless of their hardware or digital literacy. Our ecosystem has become a testbed for how "Smart Cities" can be built with quality and ethics at their core.
To stay relevant, the modern QA professional in the North West has had to trade their manual test plans for a more diverse toolkit:
- Observability & Telemetry: Using tools like OpenTelemetry to mine production logs as the primary source of test data.
- Prompt Engineering & AI Auditing: The ability to steer LLMs and validate that AI outputs are safe, unbiased, and compliant.
- Data Literacy: Understanding how data flows through microservices to predict where a system might fail before it even happens.
The biggest hurdle we face in 2026 isn't the technology - it's the skills gap. While Manchester is a magnet for talent, the demand for ‘Hybrid Engineers’ who understand both DevSecOps and Business Risk is at an all-time high.
In 2026, Quality Engineering is the ‘Golden Thread’ running through every successful digital transformation. Whether you are a startup in the Northern Quarter or a global firm at MediaCity, your ability to deliver Speed with Trust is your only true competitive advantage.
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