Top of the line products and solutions making companies more successful using AI for Code: Diffblue

In the highly competitive world we live in, Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being used to transform software development. From the code to the deployment, AI is upping its game and helping us discover a new paradigm for inventing technology. Algorithm-based machine learning is being used to accelerate the software development lifecycle, and AI supports developers in optimizing software workflow at every stage of the development process.

Globally, there are various companies providing excellent AI-enhanced software development services, among them Diffblue stands out. Diffblue is changing the way software is developed using Artificial Intelligence. Diffblue spun out of the University of Oxford in 2016 and has raised $32m of venture financing to date. Investors include IP Group, Oxford Science Enterprises, Goldman Sachs and Oxford University. Diffblue is headquartered in Oxford, UK. The company’s culture is based on independence, accountability, collaboration and intellectual curiosity. Diffblue encourage an open and diverse environment that gives its people the tools needed to grow personally and professionally.

Diffblue Cover

Diffblue Cover, the company’s first product, automatically writes tests for Java code to enable development teams to deliver higher quality software, faster. Diffblue’s technology is developed by its team of leading experts in software verification and synthesis. The company’s customers include JP Morgan, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Amazon Web Services. Diffblue Cover analyzes your existing Java program and writes unit regression tests that reflect the current behavior of the code. Diffblue Cover is software for Linux, Windows and MacOS that runs 100% locally on your computer. You can run it on your entire Java project, just one class, or anything in between. It gets your project structure and dependencies from Maven or Gradle. Cover supports Spring Java apps and writes tests that use standard Spring idioms and mocking. There is a lot more to coverage than a number you share with your management team. Even code with high coverage can leave critical gaps, while your voluminous non-critical code buffers the percentage, leaving your code base vulnerable to risk. Diffblue defines code risk as a combination of factors including code quality, complexity and coverage.

Diffblue Cover's unit regression tests run fast and verify new code changes immediately, helping users detect undesirable changes in the code’s behavior as early as possible, when they're the quickest, easiest, and cheapest to fix. And tests are automatically maintained, saving teams even more time. To ensure its customers have coverage where it’s most important, Diffblu is introducing new data visualization reports for the Diffblue Cover CLI. These reports will unlock insights about your code down to the method level with surgical precision and identify gaps in your application’s coverage to target your team’s development work.

Introducing the Diffblue Cover reports

Your reports dashboard will give you an overview of your total code coverage and a test coverage breakdown.  In this report, you will be able to see how much of your code has been covered by manually-written tests and what percentage of coverage Diffblue Cover has provided. More importantly, you will see how much of your code was not tested or could not be tested by Diffblue Cover. This may signify that some of your code requires refactoring to become testable and lower your overall code risk.

The coverage report will allow you to dive deeper into your codebase and assess coverage for classes and methods in your application. Here you may identify critical areas of your code that have disproportionately less coverage than your application overall, essentially allowing you to pinpoint exactly where your development team needs to spend time writing tests or refactoring.

IntelliJ Plugin

The IntelliJ IDEA Plugin can generate tests per method or per class within the IDE. The plugin can be used for interactive test writing on the developer desktop, and supports test-driven development (TDD) by quickly generating unit regression tests for utility code in bulk—so you can spend your time writing testable code, and unit tests that cover the complex, critical business logic.

CLI Tool

The CLI tool works 100% autonomously, configuring itself from your Maven or Gradle environment. By bringing automation to the test-writing process, the CLI tool provides a speed boost for organizations that are working towards achieving DevOps goals like CI/CD. Since it fits into a CI pipeline, the CLI tool protects the whole codebase from regressions by shifting testing left.

Meet the leader behind the success of Diffblue

Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diffblue has over twenty-five years of experience in the software industry in developer, product and marketing roles. Before joining Diffblue, his titles included SVP at Anaconda and Vice President of Cloud Services at VMWare. In each role, his focus is on building and marketing products that customers love.

“Diffblue cover can write a years’ worth of unit tests in 8 hours, at the click of a button. So developers can spend their time on more creative work.”

“Our tests document your code, making scary code changes easy. This helps you to quickly writes tests for large legacy codebases, and identifies untestable code that should be refactored.”