Diffblue, a UK-based startup, concentrated on automating software development via artificial intelligence (AI), announced that it is bringing in a free version available for developers on open source software projects. The company initiated its first product, an AI-powered Java unit testing solution, in September. Diffblue’s Community Edition IntelliJ IDEA plugin is presently accessible on the JetBrains marketplace.
“Our goal is to be the leader in applying AI to code, starting with unit tests, the critical foundation that allows developers to more frequently ship higher quality software,” said Diffblue CEO Mathew Lodge, in a statement. “We help organizations reduce time to ship, ship more often, and ship code with fewer defects while freeing up developers to focus more time on the most engaging part of their jobs. Companies on the journey to digital transformation, especially during this COVID pandemic, can’t keep up with the rapid software changes required to reorient their businesses. Automating unit testing on new and legacy code can accelerate their journey to success.”
Diffblue Cover is established on reinforcement learning (RL), a procedure of training machine learning (ML) models to take the favorable action to maximize reward in a specific situation–in other words, to understand by trial and error. In the first 15 days after the Diffblue Cover Community Edition launch, developers composed more than 21,000 Java unit tests, which conserved about 580 days of manual effort.
Where most unit test generators establish boilerplate code for tests that must be finalized by developers to get working tests, the company clarified, Cover can build complete human-readable unit tests that are prepared to run instantly. The company also asserts that its solution builds Java tests at speeds 10X-100X faster than humans that are also simple for developers to comprehend.
“As enterprises all over the world increasingly emphasize the velocity of their application development processes, unit testing becomes more and more critical,” said RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady, in a statement. “This is particularly true for the millions of enterprise Java developers worldwide, who are charged with maintaining countless critical applications for businesses large and small. The challenge is that tests can be tedious to write, and developers would prefer to devote their time and attention to writing code if the task of writing tests can be automated. This is the precise opportunity that Diffblue was built for.”
The free version was established for developers utilizing the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment, the most popular IDE for enterprise Java. The commercial editions install in less than five minutes, and deliver 100 percent automated Java unit test writing and integrate rapidly into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. The technology behind Diffblue Cover can also be expanded to support other prominent programming languages, such as C#, Python, and JavaScript.
