Amazon Q Developer Reimagines How Developers Build and Operate Software With Generative AI

Published

The most capable generative AI assistant for software development now accelerates unit testing, documentation, code reviews, and operational troubleshooting, so developers can focus on creative and exciting work

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced new enhancements to Amazon Q Developer, including agents that automate unit testing, documentation, and code reviews to help developers build faster across the entire software development process, and a capability to help users address operational issues in a fraction of the time. Amazon Q Developer is the most capable generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for software development that is available everywhere developers need it, including the AWS Management Console, through a new integrated offering with GitLab, integrated development environments (IDEs), and more.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241203644562/en/

  • Amazon Q Developer autonomously identifies and generates unit tests, helping developers catch issues earlier and improve code reliability with comprehensive test coverage in considerably less time.
  • Developers can now use Amazon Q Developer to generate and maintain all of their documentation, ensuring they always have access to the latest information about a project, enabling them to get up to speed on new code quickly, capture key project details for teammates, and improve the readability of old documentation.
  • Amazon Q Developer streamlines the code review process by automatically checking for code quality, duplication, and security vulnerabilities—quickly providing feedback to developers, so they can stay in flow and deploy high-quality code faster.
  • Leveraging the operational expertise of AWS and deep understanding of an organization’s AWS resource relationships, Amazon Q Developer now helps users of all experience levels investigate and resolve operational issues across their AWS environment in a fraction of the time, so businesses can keep their applications up and running.
  • Accenture, Amazon’s Kindle, Amazon’s Prime Video, Amazon Music, Boomi, BT Group, Cedar Gate Technologies, Deloitte, FINRA, Genesys, Netsmart, Pearson, SmugMug, and Tata Consultancy Services are among customers using Amazon Q Developer to boost developer productivity and resolve operational issues faster.

“Amazon Q Developer is fundamentally transforming how developers work and can speed up a variety of software development tasks by up to 80%, providing the highest reported code acceptance rate of any coding assistant that suggests multi-line code, code security scanning that outperforms leading publicly benchmarkable tools, and high-performing AI agents that autonomously reason and iterate to achieve complex goals,” said Deepak Singh, vice president of Next Generation Developer Experience at AWS. “For these reasons and more, customers are embracing Amazon Q Developer to increase developer productivity at every stage of the software development lifecycle. With today’s announcements, we are automating some of the most tedious aspects of building and operating applications, removing the undifferentiated work from software development to multiply the impact of every developer.”

Getting better test coverage in a fraction of the time

While writing unit tests is incredibly valuable to ensure that code works as intended and to catch potential issues early, developers find it tedious and time-consuming to implement tests across all of their code. This often results in developers deprioritizing complete test coverage for speed, risking costly rollbacks on deployed code and a compromised customer experience. Generative AI-powered assistants can help with this process, but it still takes time because a developer needs to guide them through each step. To reduce this burden on developers, Amazon Q Developer now automates the process of identifying and generating unit tests, helping developers get complete test coverage with significantly less effort, so they can ship more reliable code and deliver features faster.

Generating tests is now simple. From the IDE, developers just type “/test” in the Amazon Q Developer chat window or highlight the relevant block of code, right click, and select “test.” Amazon Q Developer then uses its knowledge of the entire project to autonomously identify and generate tests and add those tests to the project, helping developers quickly verify that the code is working as expected. In GitLab, developers can use Amazon Q Developer with the "/q test" quick action on a merge request to automatically generate tests for the code, saving time and improving test coverage across the organization. By eliminating the vast majority of work that goes into writing unit tests, Amazon Q gives developers more time back in their day to focus on coding, while still providing the coverage they need to know that their code is high quality.

Developers at companies of all sizes are using Amazon Q Developer to get better test coverage in a fraction of the time. By equipping their developers with Amazon Q Developer, Boomi, a cloud-based integration and automation platform, anticipates reducing manual testing time by 25%, achieving complete test coverage on projects 20% faster, and fixing significantly more bugs early in the development cycle—accelerating the final, human-led reviews. With Amazon Q Developer, Boomi is proactively enhancing development efficiency and code quality, saving 15% in development costs through streamlined processes. For Tata Consultancy Services, Amazon Q Developer is accelerating their entire software development lifecycle and empowering their developers to generate comprehensive, contextually-aware unit tests up to 30% faster with high accuracy, helping ensure that their code is robust, resilient, and reliable. Deloitte is cutting manual testing time by using Amazon Q Developer to automatically identify and generate unit tests, helping their developers achieve complete test coverage quicker, deliver higher quality code, and get new solutions out faster to their clients. Overall, developers at Deloitte are increasing their development speed by 30% while maintaining robust security standards.

Generating and maintaining accurate, up-to-date documentation

After developers write and test their code, they have to create documentation to explain how it works. However, as a project grows, keeping all the details up-to-date is a common pain point and often gets neglected, forcing developers who are new to the codebase to spend significant time figuring out how it works on their own. To remove this heavy lifting, Amazon Q Developer now automates the process of producing and updating documentation, making it easy for developers to maintain accurate, detailed information on their projects. Now developers no longer need to break their flow when writing code to tediously capture how it works, giving them more time to dedicate to working on their project. At the same time, development teams get an organization-wide boost in productivity because teammates no longer need to invest hours trying to understand what a piece of code does. They can now confidently jump into projects with more meaningful contributions.

Documentation creation works from both the IDE and via the integrated offering with GitLab. Getting started is easy, as developers simply type “/doc” in the IDE chat to begin producing and updating README files in their repository autonomously. To accelerate their own understanding, developers can ask Amazon Q questions about how code works or use it to improve existing documentation for better readability, making it easier for their teammates to understand their code. Amazon Q Developer presents its proposed changes for the documentation, so developers can ensure the updates are accurate and align with what they intended.

Genesys, a global provider of AI-powered experience orchestration, will use Amazon Q Developer to enhance the accuracy and readability of their existing documentation. They expect developers to onboard to unfamiliar code four times faster and improve collaboration across the organization. With this usage in combination with other Amazon Q Developer agentic capabilities, like automated unit testing, feature development, and code reviews, Genesys anticipates that it could boost developer productivity by more than 30%. Netsmart, an electronic health records and solutions provider, sees the automated documentation capability from Amazon Q Developer enabling their engineers to maintain accurate information on projects with much less effort and dive into projects up to a full week faster. Using Amazon Q Developer to streamline multiple aspects of their development process, Netsmart is already experiencing a 35% code suggestion acceptance rate and expects their efficiency gains to continue to grow.

Deploying higher quality code with automated code reviews

One of the final steps before deployment is having another developer perform a code review to check that the code adheres to their organization’s quality, style, and security standards. Developers can spend days waiting for feedback and going back-and-forth on revisions, and with typically just one reviewer, there is a chance that they could miss a potentially serious issue. To streamline this process and catch more issues sooner, Amazon Q Developer now automates code reviews, helping developers get feedback when they need it, while maintaining code quality based on engineering best practices.

By acting as a first reviewer, Amazon Q helps developers detect and resolve code-quality issues earlier, saving them time on future reviews. To initiate a review from the IDE, developers type “/review” in the chat, and Amazon Q will flag suspicious code patterns, identify open source package risks, and assess the potential impact of releasing changes to production. Amazon Q will also use the context it has from the developer's merge request to adjust its recommendations, ensuring code suggestions are consistent with their style and preferences. When developers review their merge requests, they can invoke “/q review” through GitLab Duo with Amazon Q to receive feedback and streamline the review process.

Amazon developers at Prime Video follow rigorous code reviews to maintain the highest quality and availability standards that their customers love. With Amazon Q Developer automated code reviews ready to assist them with every line of code and merge request, developers can produce higher quality code before peer reviews, reduce rollbacks and revisions, and accelerate work cycles. As early adopters of Amazon Q Developer, Prime Video developers are already saving hours each week, with some developers accepting over 50% of all generated recommendations. Developers at communications provider BT Group can turn to Amazon Q Developer to get feedback on their code in moments, at any time of the day—enabling them to iterate at high velocity and deliver more robust and secure code. In early usage, BT developers find the code review agent valuable, as it goes beyond identifying quality and security risks by also explaining the issues and suggesting the fixes to ensure that the code works as intended. Overall, BT Group is experiencing a 37% code acceptance rate and has automated around 12% of tedious, time-consuming work within the first four months of using Amazon Q Developer.

Resolving operational issues quickly

Once an application is written and deployed in production, operational teams work to make sure it is performing as expected by monitoring its health, making improvements, and fixing issues. When issues occur, teams move as quickly as possible to get the application back up and running to mitigate disruptions to their customers. However, it is a trial-and-error process that can take hours of manually sifting through vast amounts of data to find and fix the issue. Leveraging over 17 years of extensive operational experience that AWS has from running the world’s largest and most reliable cloud, Amazon Q Developer now helps operators and developers of all experience levels investigate and resolve operational issues across their AWS environment in a fraction of the time.

As soon as an Amazon CloudWatch alarm goes off, Amazon Q Developer can automatically start investigating. Utilizing its deep knowledge of an organization’s AWS resources—including information across Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Health, and AWS X-Ray—it can quickly sift through hundreds of thousands of data points to discover relationships between services and develop an understanding of how they work together to identify anomalies across related signals. After analyzing its findings, Amazon Q presents users with potential hypotheses for the root cause of the issue and guides users through how to fix it—a combination of capabilities that no other major cloud provider offers. Where possible, Amazon Q surfaces runbooks and, when approved by the user, can automatically execute on them. As Amazon Q Developer takes on the heavy lifting of investigations, users can address issues much quicker, saving significant time that can be used for more strategic work.

Users can also initiate an investigation when checking system signals, like a latency spike or logs showing users running into an error, across the AWS Management Console by selecting “Investigate” or from the Amazon Q chat by asking about their AWS resources, such as, “My AWS Lambda function is running slow. What is wrong with it?” Throughout an investigation, Amazon Q compiles all findings, actions, and suggested next steps in Amazon CloudWatch for the team to collaborate on and learn from to prevent future issues.

AWS has more operational experience and scale than any other major cloud provider, and customers are using Amazon Q Developer to get investigation insights and resolution guidance based on this expertise to operate more efficiently. Photo-management platform SmugMug will use Amazon Q Developer to automatically analyze metrics, logs, and operational events across their systems, enabling them to diagnose most issues in under 20 minutes and up to 50% faster. This improves operational efficiency by reducing manual log searches, so their team can spend less time and resources managing issues and more time building the platform to help photographers grow their digital storefronts. At Amazon, Kindle support engineers have seen 65-80% faster issue resolution while using the Amazon Q Developer operational investigation capability, helping them more quickly address the needs of customers to provide the best user experience. Amazon Music developers are using Amazon Q as a 24/7 assistant to automate investigating and identify trends across issues, helping them move faster during their on-call shifts. Early usage shows that Amazon Music is resolving issues twice as fast, so that listeners can continue to enjoy their favorite songs. Healthcare technology provider Cedar Gate Technologies is pinpointing the root cause of operational issues in about 30 minutes, compared to two hours, by using Amazon Q Developer to accelerate investigations and swiftly resolve issues so that clients across the healthcare ecosystem have continuity providing valuable care to their patients.

All of these new agents are generally available in the IDE today and in preview via the new integrated offering with GitLab. The new operational capability is available in preview.

To learn more, visit:

About Amazon Web Services

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

Amazon.com, Inc. Media Hotline Amazon-pr@amazon.com www.amazon.com/pr

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

In This Story

AMZN