Automated Unit Testing Essential to Application Modernization, New Diffblue Survey Shows

97% of survey respondents say unit testing is “extremely” or “very important” in modernizing Java applications and 90% look to automation to help

Diffblue, creators of the world’s first fully autonomous Generative AI-for-code software, announced the findings of a survey of 450 major Java users on their planning for application modernization initiatives.

The 2023 Diffblue Java Application Modernization Survey of 450 companies was conducted by the independent market research firm Vanson Bourne. Most of the companies surveyed maintain more than 100 Java applications; some have more than 1,000.

Key findings include:

• Organizations expect to modernize more than 80% of their existing Java applications over the next half decade;
• 97% say unit testing is “extremely” or “very important”;
• 96% consider Java applications to be extremely or very important to their organizations;
• 90% expect to use more automation;
• 87% consider Java modernization a higher priority than other projects.

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“In a business environment reeling from the COVID hangover, Russia-Ukraine war, threats of economic recession, inflation and rising interest rates coupled with massive layoffs, enterprises need confidence in their software more than ever,” said Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diffblue. “We think generative AI for code can play a key role in automating much of the grunt work required to modernize applications for businesses to stay competitive and thrive under these challenging market conditions.”

According to the survey, enterprises plan to invest up to half of their software effort on modernization initiatives. The economic stakes are high. Research firm Gartner estimates that worldwide software spending in 2023 will exceed $850 billion.

Diffblue offers a solution that relies on the latest advances in AI Reinforcement Learning to automate writing of unit tests without human intervention. Unlike solutions like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Github Copilot, where developers have to review code suggestions, Diffblue Cover is 100% autonomous.

Diffblue Cover gives enterprises running Java a unique way to leverage the business value of unit testing by allowing them to:

• Autonomously write and maintain unit test suites for entire applications up to 250X faster than humans;
• Automatically refactor Java code to improve testability;
• Slash the time and cost to run tests in CI (Continuous Integration);
• Help development managers understand test coverage and any code risk across their organization.

As application modernization accelerates and becomes increasingly important to the C-Suite, more and more enterprises embrace “shift left” to put more responsibilities on development teams, many of them overwhelmed already. Automation is essential.

Survey respondents said they look to automation to help them:

• Improve security (50%);
• Increase development velocity (45%);
• Improve developer experience (42%).

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