One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both. Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades: - The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real). - In under six months, we've been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes. - The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains. This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q. It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage.
These are great results Andy Jassy, pretty much impactful and insightful as well, excited to see what's next
Real quantification of the value of generative AI
I will say this is indeed impressive. Makes me proud to work in Amazon and work with best technology on planet Earth available today.
Manoj Tharwani reminded me of all the issues we used to discuss regarding the core updates!
Rodrigo Araujo
Wow this is impressive would you share the workflow you adopted at ai refactoring?
I agree🔥👍
Nicely written summary and thanks for sharing! We had the same Java 11 to Java 17 migration and I knew how true some of the statistic esp. the cost effective impacts part, and our engineers put a lot efforts to save everybody else' time on this migration. BTW we also only need the dev teams to spend a few hours for the migration of their apps. GenAI is cool but we cannot just trust the code it produces, directly with production. I think under the hood, the Amazon Q is using OpenRewrite rules to do the real work, it would be great to have a confirmation on that.
AI Generalist, Metaphysician
7moEven IF there was a silver bullet for tech debt, this ain't it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darshan-dorsey-27a16714_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232527305401679872-InHO