How AI can improve software development

January 25, 2022

Transforming business operations is a constant need, and the pandemic-prompted emphasis on modernizing legacy computing systems has forced organizations across industries to accelerate their modernization plans. The problem with mainframe modernization, however, is that today’s code search tools, linters, and program analysis tools are deficient when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with improving and even simply maintaining legacy systems.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently authored a contributed article for DevOps.com about how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help developers work more productively and decrease the risks associated with legacy system modernization and maintenance.

The article, "How AI Can Improve Software Development," explains how today's bug localization, code visualization, and error detection tools don't actually identify specific lines of code that require change. And, once the code is identified, developers are still required to build mental models of their applications to make sure any source code changes don't make even more bugs or crash the entire system.

Through intelligence augmentation, AI can automate the identification of specific lines of code that require change – developers simply ask the AI-driven knowledge repository where unwanted behaviors are coming from, and the AI quickly identifies the code associated with that behavior. Also, before the developers compile or check in the new code, the AI can forward simulate the changes and validate that they won't create more problems or break the system.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Community, Science, Technology

Tags: AI, application maintenance, artificial intelligence, assistive AI, brain drain, developer productivity, legacy systems, mainframes, maintaining legacy systems, software developer, software maintenance, steve brothers

Phase Change Published Articles

January 12, 2022

The continuing departure of experienced mainframe legacy software engineers from the workforce is driving the potentially devastating lack of system knowledge and expertise now confronting businesses and governments around the world. These mainframes surreptitiously run the global building blocks of society, from government systems to banking and financial markets and healthcare and insurance industries.

Phase Change Software endeavors to engage the industry in conversations about AI's role in bridging the knowledge gap by delivering computation conceptualization and impact verification at machine speed that produces radical productivity improvements.

We've collected our published industry articles and interviews here for your convenience. To continue the conversation, please contact Steve Brothers, President of Phase Change Software.

How a Novel Approach to AI Mitigates the Need for Comments in Code
by Steve Brothers
October 14, 2022
TechNative

How COBOL Code Can Benefit from Machine Learning Insight
by Steve Brothers
October 21, 2022
The New Stack

Colleague is a task-oriented tool that identifies the code that needs to be changed and helps with that change
by Janine Jochum-Frenster
September 29, 2022
devmio blog

An AI alternative to code search tools
by Steve Brothers
September 6, 2022
Infoworld New Tech Forum

Solving the issues with current documentation practices (interview)
by Katie Dee
August 1, 2022
SD Times

Combining developer knowledge with artificial intelligence to improve software maintenance
by Steve Brothers
May 12, 2022
The Next Tech

Reputational Risk: How AI Helps Mitigate Damage to Your Brand
by Steve Brothers
April 7, 2022
CEOWORLD magazine

Improving developer productivity on the mainframe with artificial intelligence
by Steve Brothers
February 22, 2022
Techslang.com

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is builtin-published-article-ai-fixes-code-featured-image_300dpi-1256x656_2022-02-21_tje.jpg

You can use artificial intelligence to fix your broken code
by Steve Brothers
February 22, 2022
BuiltIn.com

How banks should leverage the power of automation
by Steve Brothers
February 9, 2022
TechBullion.com

Phase Change AI Powers the Future of Financial Services — Just Not in the Ways You Think
by The Fintech Times
February 1, 2022
The Fintech Times

How AI can improve software development
by Steve Brothers
January 13, 2022
DevOps.com

Leveraging AI to Significantly Increase Software Developer Productivity
by Steve Brothers
December 13, 2021
readwrite

How AI can support maintenance of aging government systems
by Steve Brothers
July 20, 2021
Nextgov.com

AI rises to the challenge with COBOL
by Steve Brothers
May 28, 2021
techradar.pro

Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap
by Steve Brothers
May 19, 2021
BetaNews.com

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?
by Steve Brothers
May 15, 2020
ColoradoBiz Magazine.com

Published by Phase Change Staff in Community, Company

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, cobol skills shortage, mainframes, steve brothers

Leveraging AI to Significantly Increase Software Developer Productivity

January 10, 2022

Tech media publisher readwrite recently published an article authored by Phase Change President Steve Brothers about how AI can be used to vastly improve a developer’s ability to efficiently identify code that requires modification or modernization.

The article, Leveraging AI to Significantly Increase Software Developer Productivity, makes the case for thinking about codebases differently and using AI to help developers quickly and efficiently find relevant code.as knowledge repositories.

Developers new to software applications often require months or even years of on-the-job training to avoid making dangerous mistakes and putting critical systems at risk. With today's tools, developers spend roughly 75% of their time searching through and reading source code to identify the relevant code that produces the functionality that requires modification or modernization.

By using AI tools to analyze source code and discover each and every one of its behaviors at machine speed, the code repository can become a knowledge repository that represents source code in the same way that humans think about the world, in cause and effect. The AI interacts and collaborates with developers to disregard code unrelated to the behavior and narrows down the codebase to the specific code that needs to change, without searching through and understanding all of the surrounding code.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published by Phase Change Staff in Community, Technology

Tags: AI, application maintenance, artificial intelligence, assistive AI, developer productivity, new developer, software developer, steve brothers

How AI can support maintenance of aging government systems

July 21, 2021

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently authored a contributed article for Nextgov.com about how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help governments deal with the mainframe-developers skills shortage and continue to maintain critical legacy systems.

The article, How AI Can Help with Critical Government System Maintenance Needs, describes how we should change the current industry strategy of solving the skills crisis by simply increasing the number of programmers with legacy language skills.

Brothers' article explains why the problem isn't just language skills, it's the lack of application knowledge to productively maintain applications. Supporting applications is very different than creating them. Defects are discovered through behaviors, which the developer must trace back to the flawed source code. The defective code and its dependencies can be spread throughout the codebase in multiple modules and repositories. Without the application knowledge to know how the system works, maintenance becomes an unproductive scavenger hunt. Then the developer must discover how the repair will impact the rest of the system.

AI tools help developers locate and isolate defective code by conceptualizing code computations at machine speed. It eliminates code unrelated to the bad behavior and enables the developer to find and focus on defects. Then the AI simulates running the repaired code to determine change impact so the developer is confident his work won't negatively affect the application.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Technology

Tags: AI, application knowledge gap, application maintenance, artificial intelligence, cobol, cobol applications, cobol brain drain, cobol skills shortage, knowledge gap, software developer, software developer application knowledge gap, software developer shortage, software maintenance, system knowledge

AI rises to the challenge with COBOL

June 3, 2021

by Todd Erickson

A May 28 article published by TechRadar pro, and written by Phase Change President Steve Brothers, explains how the well-reported "COBOL skills shortage" is not really a fundamental problem for enterprises that rely on mainframe systems. The real challenge is application knowledge. Developers can learn COBOL in less than 6 months. What they can't learn quickly is specific application knowledge because that knowledge comes from experience.

Steve also describes how AI tools that assist developers in identifying and locating code responsible for specific behavior will help them reveal the application's intent and expose code that requires change. The developers will learn the application through task completion while remaining productive for the organization.

Click here to read the full article on TechRadar pro.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Company, Technology

Tags: AI, application knowledge gap, artificial intelligence, cobol, cobol applications, knowledge gap, software developer, software developer application knowledge gap, software development, software maintenance

Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap

May 25, 2021

by Todd Erickson

Although the modern enterprise moves quickly to adopt and support helpful new technologies, most organizations must continue to rely on their legacy systems for core functions. Legacy applications struggle to evolve fast enough to support shifting and evolving organization demands. The companies frequently try alternate strategies to keep pace, such as building on top of existing applications or moving them to other platforms, but these approaches only complicate another risk -- the software developer shortage.

On May 19, BetaNews.com published the article, "Leveraging AI to close the application knowledge gap," which was written by Phase Change President Steve Brothers. The story explains how the software-developer shortage forces many companies to work around legacy applications when they lose the expert developers that built and maintained them, and how those word-arounds can produce disastrous results for the organizations' bottom lines and reputations.

Steve also describes how artificial intelligence (AI) can reinterpret what source-code computations represent and convert them into concepts so developers no longer have to research and discern the original developers' intent. This enables new developers to quickly understand the applications' behaviors, and with that knowledge, the AI can quickly guide developers to the precise area of code where changes need to be made.

Read the full story here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Science, Technology

Tags: AI, application knowledge gap, application maintenance, artificial intelligence, legacy systems, maintaining legacy systems, software developer shortage

How Leveraging AI Technology Enables Developers

May 23, 2021

Phase Change Software President Steve Brothers was recently interviewed for a TechChannel article on how artificial intelligence (AI) can help software developers increase productivity and reduce risk.

The article, "How Leveraging AI Technology Enables Developers: AI technology enables productivity gains, reduces code querying time, and mitigates risk," was written by Sofia Haan and discusses how AI can assist developers in quickly finding code that produces specific behavior so they spend less time analyzing, refining, and iterating queries, and more time mending defective code and writing new code.

Read the article here.

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Technology

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, assistive AI, developer productivity, productivity, querying code, software developer, software development, understanding code

Phase Change President: Creative & focused AI needed to help COBOL skills shortage

April 9, 2021

The so-called "COBOL Skills Shortage" is compelling many organizations to impetuously hire and train programmers to maintain, support, and attempt to modernize their COBOL systems.
But understanding how to write COBOL is not enough — developers have to comprehend what an application actually does and how code changes can impact the system as a whole to avoid critical missteps. That work for those developers is cognitively difficult.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently wrote an article for Built In Colorado.com about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve the application knowledge gap problem, but only when traditional AI technology gets more creative and moves beyond understanding general business knowledge and instead learns specialized industry and institutional domain knowledge.

AI & software development

AI can help solve the application knowledge gap dilemma, but popular contemporary AI approaches are insufficient. Some AI tools can help with the syntax of writing code, but these remedies only provide incremental value.

Developers spend nearly 75 percent of their time finding the area in the source code in which they need to make a change because understanding code in these large complex systems is difficult and time-consuming.

AI will emerge as a paradigm-changing technology when it can understand code intent and “reimagine” computation into concepts, thereby doing what a developer does when they code — but at machine speed.

Read Steve’s entire Built In Colorado article at https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/cobol-skills-shortage.

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Company, Technology

Tags: AI, application knowledge gap, artificial intelligence, assistive AI, cobol, cobol brain drain, developer-engineer, executives, knowledge gap, mainframes, maintaining legacy systems, software development, steve brothers, understanding

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?

May 28, 2020

May 30, 2020

by Todd Erickson

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed workforce shortages in a number of industries, including healthcare, food retail, and cybersecurity.

The related financial crisis and government financial assistance requests have also demonstrated a critical need for legacy system developers. The recent performance issues experienced by these financial assistance programs have exposed how dependent our financial and public infrastructure are on legacy and mainframe systems.

Phase Change COO Steve Brothers recently penned an article for ColoradoBiz Magazine about how the legacy application skills shortage threatens the software that underpins a great deal of the world's large financial and government systems.

He also talks about how artificial intelligence (AI) can be extremely effective in helping legacy application maintenance and development by introducing automation into the process, improving project management efficiencies, and by shortening the steep training curve typically experienced by developers new to these systems.

Learn more about how the improved productivity and efficiency AI brings to software development could be instrumental in maintaining and improving our critical legacy and mainframe systems.

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?
by Steve Brothers
ColoradoBiz magazine
May 15, 2020

Steve Brothers is the President of Phase Change Software. You can reach him on LinkedIn or at [email protected].

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer at Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published by Phase Change Staff in Applied, Company, Technology

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, cobol, legacy systems, maintaining legacy systems, productivity, software developer, software maintenance, steve brothers

Colorado Inno profile explains how AI agent improves developer productivity

May 8, 2020

by Todd Erickson

Colorado Inno.com Associate Editor Nick Greenhalgh recently interviewed Phase Change President Steve Brothers for a profile story titled, "Golden startup's AI aims to make developers more efficient," that explains how our technology operates as a subject-matter expert and will improve software-developer efficiency and productivity, especially for industries that rely on enterprise software.

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