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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