Exploring AWS CodeGuru: New automated code review has smart features – but Java-only

AWS's automated code review and profiling tool CodeGuru drew substantial interest when it was announced at the vendor's re:Invent shindig in Las Vegas this month. Developers like the idea of automated code review and even small amounts of time saved or bugs averted are of considerable value. Modern editors like Eclipse or …

[InsaneGeek]

Get you coming and going

So basically if you jump in today, you are paying to train AWS to give you better information in the future. Provided enough people give it information to learn it could become powerful but it seems like they need to either to a lot more training of it to being value or dramatically reduce the price until it is good.

[martinusher]

If you have to use this type of anaylsis then there's probably something wrong with the design

I'm really old fashioned, I was brought up back when compiling and debugging code was a tedious process so I learned quite early on to treat coding as the very last step in the programming process. As a result I've always been a bit suspicious of IDEs, not because I don't like convenience ("real men don't need tools" sort of thing) but rather the kind of assistance you get should be the kind that you don't need. As 'kmedcalf' points out above "Coding Assistance with common errors and auto completion are two of the most annoying things ever invented!". The reason's obvious -- fixing code syntax errors is trivial (if it isn't then you're not coding correctly) but finding bugs in the logic, logic that may require interaction with specialized hardware components, is not.

[Anonymous Coward]

IP

I tell you what, you send me all of your company IP and I'll tell you if I find any mistakes ;)

Check the Ts & Cs carefully on this one or you could end up like the people who used to sell things on Amazon Marketplace before Amazon undercut them.

[Aitor 1]

Re: IP

Precisely.

This is a bad idea beyond belief

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: IP

Won't stop the imbeciles in the C-suite crawling all over it like a rash, though, and the people who actually do the work will have to use it whether they want to or not.

(until they receive their first invoice, that is ...)

[Cardinal]

AWS's automated "code review and profiling" tool

Could be a possible banana skin acronym in there somewhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

For profiling there are options available that run on anywhere and open source

You can have request attributed profiling (https://github.com/zolyfarkas/jaxrs-spf4j-demo/wiki/ContinuousProfiling ) and aggregated profiling (https://github.com/zolyfarkas/jaxrs-spf4j-demo/wiki/ContinuousProfiling2). And if you want to reason about the data, it helps that all of it is produced by open source code.

[Crypto Monad]

Can I check I understand this right. Amazon trained their code review tool using machine learning on a bunch of open-source Java code on Github. Then when run against your repo, it makes suggestions how to change *your* code to make it look more like open-source Java code on Github?

[Aitor 1]

Uups!

So crap quality then..

[Dingobat]

Race condition? Is it April 1st?

That's not a race condition, it's just an inefficient polling wait for the object to be created, and it recommended a fix, so durr.

Too much Christmas sauce to think properly?

[Michael Wojcik]

Citation needed

Developers like the idea of automated code review

Do they? Yet the vast majority seem to be reluctant to use linters, even free ones, or even enable aggressive compiler diagnostics. And as anyone who's been paying attention to this aspect of the industry for the last few decades knows, it's quite difficult to sell most organizations on high-quality static- and dynamic-analysis tools for source code, even though those tools have an excellent record at finding common bugs.

As a class, developers do not take criticism of their code well, even (perhaps especially) when it comes from a machine. Nor do they like systems which make latent work (technical debt and lurking maintenance issues) patent. They should, since this would mean better quality and less overall effort; but they do not.