New platform capabilities leverage generative AI, expanding automation of the software development lifecycle
Crowdbotics, pioneer of CodeOps as the new standard methodology for software development, announced today the availability of new capabilities of its AI-powered application development platform, aimed at addressing the most significant challenges in the application development industry. 70% of development project failures are due to poor or missing requirements. Inconsistent architecture decisions across the technology portfolio slow down application delivery, and the inability to accurately predict cloud costs for new applications results in uncertainty and risk. The new capabilities within the Crowdbotics platform aim to address these–and more–critical business and technological issues.
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Crowdbotics will be attending GitHub Universe on October 29 – October 30, 2024 in San Francisco, CA. Please visit us where we will be demoing the Crowdbotics platform and its new capabilities.
Reimagine and Accelerate the Application Development Process
Launched in January 2024, the Crowdbotics platform is an AI-driven application development accelerator designed for organizations updating or modifying existing applications or building entirely new ones. The platform automates the entire software development lifecycle, from converting business requirements into engineering specifications to defining technology architecture, building data models, and even generating starter code.
The first step in using the Crowdbotics platform is generating a comprehensive Product Requirement Document (PRD). Leveraging generative AI and new platform features, Crowdbotics turns a simple textual prompt into a comprehensive, high-quality PRD that bridges the gap between the business stakeholder’s needs and the corresponding engineering specifications. By starting with a well-constructed PRD, teams significantly accelerate the development process while mitigating, and even eliminating, most of the risks.
Crowdbotics is continuously releasing new capabilities for its platform, and today, the company is announcing the release of the following:
Enterprise Context
Enterprise Context enables IT leaders and architects to define common corporate standards and policies that are applied during the creation of a new product requirements document (PRD). These can include the specification of development languages, frameworks, preferred APIs, cloud services, as well as regulatory and compliance requirements that must be enforced as common standards across applications. This capability is a crucial addition for large enterprises building extensive portfolios of applications, and for system integrators seeking to maintain uniformity across various projects. Enterprise Context ensures consistency and predictability across applications and improves the accuracy and speed of the PRD creation process.
Technical Recommendations
Once a project’s requirements are locked, the platform’s Technical Recommendations feature utilizes AI to decompose the requirements into functional specifications that include architectural and design recommendations. For instance, for each requirement in a PRD, Technical Recommendations will segment the implementation of the feature into recommended front-end, back-end, and data architectures. Furthermore, Technical Recommendations – taking into account an organization’s Enterprise Context – generates a list of suggested services and third-party APIs to implement the required capability. For example, it might recommend Microsoft Entra ID if authentication is required, and this is doubly true if the org’s Enterprise Context indicates a preference for Microsoft Azure services. At its core, Technical Recommendations uses AI to accelerate the planning phase of a development project as well as to remove risk by enforcing standards and consistency.
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Application Code Generation
Complementing the new Technical Recommendations feature, Application Code Generation uses all of the contextual information from the PRD, from Enterprise Context, and from Technical Recommendations to generate as much as 50% of the required code, dramatically lightening the load for developers. Application Code Generation takes care of much of the toil and commodity code such as generating code for CRUD data operations and for third-party API handling. However, it can also implement crucial business logic such as data validation rules and simple work flows as defined by the PRD. Because the Application Code Generation feature takes advantage of the broadest possible wealth of context, accuracy and code coverage are maximized. Furthermore, this top down approach to code generation is the first major step toward our ultimate goal of using AI to generate feature-complete applications.
Cloud Consumption Cost Estimation
As more companies transition their applications to the cloud, one of the biggest design challenges is understanding the cost implications of fundamental architecture choices – particularly when it comes to cloud runtime services. Cloud hosting pricing models are complex, multifaceted, and difficult to predict without post-deployment runtime data. With its new Cloud Consumption Cost Estimation capability leveraging generative AI, Crowdbotics can now predict monthly consumption costs for cloud-based applications. By delivering cost data at the beginning of the project, this ground-breaking capability enables engineers to make critical decisions about architecture and design early in the development cycle, avoiding costly and hard to fix mistakes.
Jira Integration
The Crowdbotics platform is designed to work seamlessly in concert with customer’s existing DevOps investments. In keeping with that goal, Crowdbotics has added the ability to integrate with Jira as well as other project management platforms. This makes it easy for customers to turn their PRDs into project plans that are managed by Jira, Azure DevOps or any other project management platforms. Integrations like these ensure that customers are able to reap the productivity benefits of the Crowdbotics platform without impacting existing DevOps tools, infrastructure or processes.
Azure Deployer
With the Azure Deployer, organizations can now deploy applications built with the Crowdbotics platform to the Azure Cloud using a push of a button. The Crowdbotics Platform enables developers to generate high-level requirements from simple specifications, progressively break down those requirements into detailed build plans, generate code, and ultimately–to deploy to Azure—all without writing any Infrastructure as Code (IAC) or CI/CD pipelines. Crowdbotics manages this process and generates the infrastructure needed to support an out-of-the-box application. Subsequent updates are made seamlessly using the same streamlined approach.
“We should never accept that 70% of all applications will fail,” said Anand Kulkarni, founder and CEO of Crowdbotics. “The Crowdbotics Platform ensures development teams have access to more information than ever before to capture business and user requirements, make intelligent technology decisions, and even automate the writing of high-quality code, so companies can achieve their goals and drive success.”
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