NAB doubles use of Amazon code assistant within months

NAB has rapidly scaled up the number of engineers working with Amazon’s AI coding assistant from 450 to 1000 within the space of a few months.

NAB's Andrew Brydon.
Eleanor Dickinson

The coding assistant, formerly called CodeWhisperer and now known as Amazon Q Developer, began as a proof-of-concept with 20-to-30 NAB engineers largely focused on day-to-day code writing.

Having been scaled up to 450 engineers by April, Q Developer is now being used by 1000 engineers.

New hires are now using it to get familiar with NAB's software development lifecycle and become productive faster.

“At the beginning, we were thinking about repeatable outcomes that engineers are working on, so documentation and repeatable boilerplate code,” NAB chief engineer Andrew Brydon told an AWS AI Day in Sydney.

“We’ve been able to add NAB-specific vectors through customisations, so that helps us with onboarding new engineers or getting people familiar with other codebases across the group.

“What we are trying to do is drive down that time to being productive in our environment.”

Brydon said he first began exploring Q Developer with the “hypothesis that if we make people happier, we make them productive”.

In order to build a use case around this hypothesis, NAB first began piloting Q Developer among a small group and “integrating it into their rapid development environment”.

“We onboarded a small group and started looking at and talking to them about how they use the tool,” he said.

“We used that to build some confidence internally around, 'This is something we want to go forward with and work with’.”

Adding that he is “really focused on that developer happiness metric”, Brydon explained that the pilot was then used to expand and scale the use of Q Developer among NAB’s developers based in Australia, Vietnam and India.

Repeating a survey carried out among NAB developers and first revealed at AWS Summit Sydney, Brydon said half of the code suggestions by Q Developer are being accepted by engineers and 40 percent saw “improved productivity” from using the tool.

In addition, he said 45 percent of engineers saw an improvement in the quality of the final code from using the tool.

Currently, Brydon said NAB is exploring the use of Q Developer for code language upgrades.

“We have a large number of applications we manage in the organisation,” he said. “Getting from Java 8 to 11 to 17 is not an easy thing for us to do.

“To have something to help us do that quickly with a smaller number of engineers is really beneficial to our organisation.”