First AI-Driven Unit Testing Solution for Java Goes GA

Diffblue, a UK-based startup founded by University of Oxford researchers, and focused on automating software development through artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the launch of its first product: an AI-powered Java unit testing solution.

Diffblue Cover, which the two-year-old company is billing as the first product of its kind, uses AI for code to automate the writing of unit tests. It's based on reinforcement learning (RL) research conducted at Oxford by the company's founders. RL is a method of training machine learning (ML) models to take the best action to maximize reward in a particular situation--in other words, to learn by trial and error. It's the same method used in AlphaGo, the Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind's software that beat the human world champion player of Go.

Where most unit test generators create boilerplate code for tests that must be completed by developers to get functioning tests, the company explained in a statement, Cover is able to create complete human-readable unit tests that are ready to run immediately. In fact, the company claims that its solution creates Java tests at speeds 10X-100X faster than humans that are also easy for developers to understand, and automatically maintains the tests as the code evolves, even on applications with tens of millions of lines of code.

"Our goal is to be the leader in applying AI to code, starting with unit tests, the critical foundation that allows developers to more frequently ship higher quality software," said Diffblue CEO Mathew Lodge, in a statement. "We help organizations reduce time to ship, ship more often, and ship code with fewer defects while freeing up developers to focus more time on the most engaging part of their jobs. Companies on the journey to digital transformation, especially during this COVID pandemic, can't keep up with the rapid software changes required to reorient their businesses. Automating unit testing on new and legacy code can accelerate their journey to success."

The initial release of Diffblue Cover comes in three editions: Teams and Enterprise, which are commercial editions, and the free-for-Java-devs Community Edition. The free version (downloadable from the JetBrains marketplace) was created for developers using the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment, the most popular IDE for enterprise Java. The commercial editions install in less than five minutes, the company says, and provide 100 percent automated Java unit test writing and integrate directly into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. The technology behind Diffblue Cover can also be extended to support other popular programming languages, the company says, such as Python, JavaScript, and C#.

"As enterprises all over the world increasingly emphasize the velocity of their application development processes, unit testing becomes more and more critical," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, in a statement. "This is particularly true for the millions of enterprise Java developers worldwide, who are charged with maintaining countless critical applications for businesses large and small. The challenge is that tests can be tedious to write, and developers would prefer to devote their time and attention to writing code if the task of writing tests can be automated. This is the precise opportunity that Diffblue was built for."

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