CodeAuto – Macrosoft’s New Code Automation Helper Tool using AI

Macrosoft is excited to announce its newest AI based code automation helper – CodeAuto.

Macrosoft has a longstanding tradition of leveraging the newest technology, and we are convinced that AI will fundamentally and decisively impact our industry. Keeping this in view, we are devoting considerable resources to evaluating and understanding how AI tools can assist our developers and testers in their daily work by enhancing their productivity. As the first outcome of this R&D attempt on AI, Macrosoft has built its own custom code helper named CodeAuto which works as a plugin in the VS code itself.

The Basic Functions of CodeAuto

CodeAuto provides various features to support developers and testers. It can help developers and testers in:

• Creating unit test scripts for the methods.
• Refactorization of the code.
• Writing inline documentation for the code.
• Optimization of code in better ways. *
• Identification of errors in the code. *
• Explanation of the code. *

Features in detail

Explain Selection

This feature allows a developer to understand the specific functionality associated to each piece of code. It is akin to having an experienced tech leader review a developer’s code and can be used often. Much more often than it would be realistically possible for a supervisor to review the new code from each developer in his team.

CodeAuto can explain a piece of code as well as the full method. Whether it is a Legacy code like VFP/VB6, or any latest technologies like C#/Angular etc, it aids the developer the understanding of the code. Macrosoft developers can now begin to use this feature to understand the legacy code and can thereby efficiently reduce the time required to understand the legacy code. Understanding of the legacy code leads to undertaking the migration of the same by maximizing the productivity.

Refactor Selection

This feature helps a developer by providing actual, realistic and useful refactored code related to a developer’s selection/method. In each case of the refactored code, the developer can review the code provided by CodeAuto and can make the decision for its utilization in the project.

Find problems

This feature assists developers to find any errors or potential errors in their code. The developer can select any code snippet or a whole method to check for errors in the code.

Optimize Selection

This feature supports the developer by optimizing the code based on the selection. With this feature, CodeAuto can provide better coding practices and standards. This is especially useful for training of our junior developers and trainees by showing explicitly (within their actual code content) the better and preferred ways of coding. Without needing the tech supervisors to spend their time reviewing and training our junior developers on these practices, this feature is a game-changer.

Write Documentation

This feature assists the developer by writing the documentation of any selection of code. This feature will improve the understandability of the code with the additional advantage of saving time and effort spent on manually creating and updating the documentation.

This plugin ensures that the code is consistently well maintained, documented, and updated. The write documentation feature reduces the bugs and misunderstanding associated with any specific extensions for future modifications of the code. Provision of this complete and updated documentation is a huge benefit, for our developers and clients alike as we delegate the completed projects to the client.

Write Unit Tests

CodeAuto can write the unit test scripts for specific or all the methods generated by the development team. The test scripts can be generated with parameterized or defined static inputs/outputs. This feature helps developers to have the basic structure of the various test scripts required rather than having to create these unit test scripts from the scratch. This feature of CodeAuto saves huge time. Many of our clients ask for partial or full coverage of unit test scripts and by using this feature we can accommodate this requirement with enhanced ease and cost efficiency.

Summary

CodeAuto has already started assisting our developers by saving time and improving efficiency and accuracy. As noted above, many of the benefits accrue to our clients as well.

We are dedicated to the implementation of many more features and functionalities to CodeAuto in the coming months.  Utilizing ChatGPT (AI in general) in our coding processes is essential as it assists in providing best-in-class development methods to our clients. We expect these tools to fundamentally transform and improve development methods and processes and we are committed to staying on the leading edge of these changing landscape.

_{* : Proposed features in subsequent updates}