How has AI Been Helpful in Developing Better Software?

Artificial Intelligence has largely been a reason why designing, developing, and deploying software has turned into a better and cheaper process for programmers. It is not the case that is being feared by many – AI replaying the developers – instead, AI-powered tools are increasing the productivity and effectiveness of project managers, business analysts, software developers, and testers, allowing them to produce higher-quality software more quickly at a cheaper cost. AI might play a significant role in supplying the growing need for customized software.

Organizations Struggling to Meet Raising Software Demands

Custom software development and deployment is a key component of how many businesses innovate, with top-performing companies producing many of their most crucial software solutions in-house. Additionally, there is a sizable market for custom software development services, with an estimated US$47 billion in 2018. But 65 years after the creation of the FORTRAN programming language, significant challenges continue to hamper efforts to produce software, a prominent one being a persistent shortage of qualified developers.

Moreover, a 2017 survey indicated that 20% of all software projects were completely abandoned while more than half were delayed and grappled with budget issues. Poor software quality cost US businesses an estimated $319 billion last year.

How Has AI Been Helpful?

New AI-powered tools have had an impeccable impact on the software development process, with the keystrokes developers now requiring to type half of what they conventionally used to. One could even detect bugs before code review or testing, ultimately requiring half of the quality tests needed. It is crucial to comprehend another trend in software development, open source, to appreciate why this is occurring right now. 

In order to comprehend how this is happening, one must understand the importance of another software development trend, i.e. open source.   By enabling developers to reuse and expand upon the work of others, open-source software has reduced the cost of software development. Both large and small businesses use open-source software. A study found that 96% of the 1,100 commercial applications assessed employed open-source components. Any developer can use a sizable and continually expanding amount of open-source software.

Codes as well have become more helpful than ever, thanks to AI technology. Researchers have found that source code and other information regarding software development, such as records of project schedules, delays, application problems, and their remedies, can be analyzed using machine learning and natural language processing. This enables certain developer labor to be automated. An entirely new generation of AI tools thus is emerging, leading and empowering software developers to write more dependable code, create better requirements documents, and automatically find bugs and security risks.