Customize Amazon Q Developer to speed up enterprise development (DOP216)

Customizing Amazon Q Developer to Speed Up Enterprise Development

The Challenges of Modern Software Development

  • Increasing developer productivity is more than just writing code faster
  • Developers spend less than 1 hour per week in the IDE, the rest is spent on:
    • Encountering and debugging errors
    • Analyzing and digesting metrics
    • Finding the right solutions for the organization

Transforming the Development Experience

  • The traditional software development lifecycle needs to change
  • Developers often get bogged down with repetitive tasks like writing unit tests, security scanning, and solving problems that have been solved elsewhere
  • Generative AI is transforming the development experience
  • Amazon Q Developer is the first step in transforming the entire development experience

Amazon's Software Development Journey

  • Amazon was built on a monolithic architecture with a single database, taking 11 hours to update any feature
  • Adopted a service-oriented architecture with "two pizza teams" to increase ownership and speed of delivery
  • Focused on time-to-market as a key business priority
  • Developed a microservices development lifecycle to support rapid and frequent releases

Customizing Amazon Q Developer

  • Challenges faced by Amazon's development teams:
    • Domain-specific knowledge: Different industries, organizations, and projects have their own coding conventions, best practices, libraries, and frameworks
    • Project-specific requirements: Consistency with internal practices, leveraging proprietary libraries
  • Customizing Amazon Q Developer:
    • Increases relevance and productivity by tailoring to organizational standards and best practices
    • Ensures developers stay within the flow of writing code without getting bogged down

Getting Started with Customization

  • Two personas involved: Developer and Admin
  • Admin sets up the customization by:
    • Ingesting code from various sources (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, S3)
    • Evaluating the ingested code and getting a score
    • Activating the customization and provisioning users
  • Developers can choose from the available customizations within the IDE

Benefits of Customization

  • Prime Video team saw a 50% acceptance rate for inline code suggestions after customization, compared to 35-37% without customization
  • Expectation of 60% improvement in overall productivity for teams like Prime Video due to reduced manual tasks

National Australia Bank's Journey with Q Developer Customization

  • Adopted a data-driven approach, starting with a small POC and gradually scaling to 1,000 developers
  • Key outcomes:
    • 87% of developers recommended Q Developer to their colleagues
    • 50% of code suggestions accepted by developers
    • 41% said it improved their productivity and efficiency
    • 45% said it improved the quality of code sent to production
  • Focused on customizing Q Developer for specific frameworks and use cases
  • Lessons learned:
    • Importance of training and getting developers to understand the capabilities
    • Ensuring a smooth user experience with minimal lag
    • Identifying and leveraging specific use cases to drive adoption and scale

Conclusion

  • Customizing Amazon Q Developer enables organizations to leverage their specific domain knowledge, coding conventions, and best practices
  • This leads to increased relevance, productivity, and quality of the development process
  • Both Amazon and National Australia Bank have seen significant benefits from customizing Q Developer

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