Car mechanics are all about their tools. Their biggest expense when starting a repair shop is building a toolchest with tools that make the difference between a difficult job and one that is easy. A new miracle tool that will save time on projects and still produce quality results will make their day—and they will tell their peers all about it.
Developers, does this sound familiar? Developers also compare tools and tricks, looking for ways to produce quality code faster. This has driven the growth of configurable integrated development environments (IDEs) like Eclipse and VS Code. When diagnosing issues or planning for a change, smart developers have adopted tools that automatically analyze their code, produce structure and logic flow charts, and map the data flow. In the past, these were considered miracle tools that made developers’ jobs much easier. How could anyone work without them? But there was one tool missing.
Developers were looking for a tool that would quickly explain complex sections of code. Rather than hunting through a program, they wanted an assistant that worked alongside them to check over the code and summarize it. Then they could identify which sections needed changes. On a program level, they needed a way to determine what a program does, and to see whether to go further with analysis or move to the next one. The existing tools made their jobs easier, but there was still an elusive tool that could make it even better.
That tool has arrived. BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, which helps developers understand their complex applications with real-time application analysis and program level understanding, now offers the ability to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) using BMC AMI Assistant to explain sections of code.
A developer working in Code Insights merely highlights a section of the code, right-clicks, and selects “Explain.” Then BMC AMI Assistant returns a short summary of the business logic and a detailed description of the code’s logic flow. Developers now have an easily available way to work with confidence on the code using BMC Editor in Eclipse or VS Code. They can see charting to understand the structure of the program and the flow of the logic, trace data from its arrival to its departure, and get a quick explanation of their complex logic—right from the editor they use every day.
The incorporation of new technologies has continually improved the quality, speed, and efficiency of modern mainframe development versus the days of the green screen, and the use of AI is continuing that trend. While modern IDEs, automated analysis, and instantly available data flow charts brought mainframe development to new heights, developers still lacked full insight into how their code changes affected business logic. With BMC AMI Assistant’s code explain feature, the missing tool has now been delivered.
