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As software development undergoes a seismic shift with GenAI at the forefront, testing, quality assurance, and observability are being transformed in unprecedented ways. These advancements are driving new levels of automation and efficiencies, while challenging traditional methodologies and long-held assumptions about speed, adaptability, and innovation. As GenAI automates routine tasks and enables smarter decision-making, it is raising critical questions about oversight, reliability, and responsibility. In this era of rapid transformation, the industry must balance GenAI’s immense potential with its inherent risks to ensure a future of sustainable progress. GenAI is transforming how software development teams think about QA and observability. Traditionally seen as separate domains, QA and observability now converge under the capabilities of GenAI, setting new standards for speed, adaptability, and precision. This integration demands a shift in how we approach and align these discipl...

JetBrains has released its annual State of Developer Ecosystem report, highlighting the trends across software development. This year the report includes a new section called the Language Promise Index, which ranks languages by growth, stability, and adoption willingness. Across the board since 2017, JavaScript has topped the list, with 61% of users programming in that language. “Once developers choose an ecosystem, they typically don’t plan on adopting any other technology or toolset. As is often the case, people tend to pick what they like and stick with what they know,” JetBrains wrote in the report.  However, TypeScript, Rust, and Python are also showing growth year-over-year, which the company says is a reflection of their versatility and appeal across different domains.  TypeScript has grown from 12% usage in 2017 to 37% in 2024, Python has grown from 32% usage in 2017 to 57% in 2024, and Rust has grown from 2% usage in 2018 (no data from 2017) to 11% in 2024. ...

Google has announced the launch of the latest model in the Gemini family, as well as a new coding agent for developers called Jules.  Gemini comes in two different model variants , with Flash balancing performance with speed and Pro optimizing for performance. The newest model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, is twice as fast as Gemini 1.5 Pro (first previewed in February 2024) while also achieving stronger performance.  Specifically, it features improved multimodal, text, code, video, spatial understanding, and reasoning performance across a variety of benchmarks .    Gemini 2.0 Flash will also feature new output modalities of text, images, and audio, whereas Gemini 1.5 Flash could only output text. Image and audio output is currently still listed as “coming soon” on the Gemini website, but Google says that rollout is expected next year.  Audio output is multilingual and can be spoken in eight different voices, with control over the language and accent. Image outp...

OpenSilver 3.1 has been released, bringing new features to the open source framework for building web apps using .NET. These include a drag-and-drop XAML designer for VS code, a more modern UI theme, expanded support for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) features, and full compatibility with .NET 9. The new drag-and-drop XAML designer in VS Code includes over 100 ready-to-use controls, such as data grids and charts, and a built-in AI assistant for generating UI layouts. It also works seamlessly across Windows, macOS, and Linux, making this a major milestone for cross-platform development, as previously XAML UI design was limited to Visual Studio on Windows.  Its new UI theme is more modern and takes inspiration from Material and Fluent Design principles. It includes light and dark modes and the ability to easily adjust color palettes. Additionally, the splash screen that indicates that an application is loading also now has a more modern look.  Developers working on l...

The data information and analytics company LexisNexis today announced the launch of Nexis Data+ , a new API that provides access to corporate, legal, financial, and compliance data, as well as generative AI-approved licensed news content. Developers and data analysts will be able to integrate that data into their existing tools, platforms, AI models, and workflows to enable better decision-making and analysis for their organizations. Specifically, LexisNexis claims it can power AI initiatives such as model training, generative AI applications, natural language processing, event modeling and prediction, risk modeling, pattern discovery, predictive and descriptive analytics, and statistical analysis. The portfolio of licensed news content includes over 23,000 publications, including The Associated Press, McClatchy, Gannett, Business Insider, South China Morning Post, Benzinga, American Banker, AWP Finanznachrichten, American City Business Journals, and more.  It also includes ac...

Change is necessary for growth in software engineering organizations, but adapting to change requires time, energy and resources that can detract from a focus on delivering value. While a certain degree of change is essential, excessive change can lead to change fatigue among developers. Change fatigue is a negative response to change and can include apathy, burnout and frustration, all of which harm organizational outcomes. Gartner has found that in 2023, employees experienced four times as many organizational changes as they did in 2016. For software engineering teams, these changes can include context switching across tasks, shifts in project priorities, adoption of new tools and technologies, as well as reorganizations. The consequences of change fatigue are severe, including resistance to change and employee burnout. Given the prevalence and impact of change fatigue, the key question for software engineering leaders is, “How can I address change fatigue to reduce developer burn...

OpenAI has announced the release of its Usage API, which provides developers with insights into activity across the OpenAI API, allowing them to better track costs.  Developers can monitor token usage by the minute, hour, or day, and filter usage by invoice line item, API key, project ID, user ID, model, and more. The Usage API also comes with a separate Costs endpoint that can be used to manage costs, optimize workflows, and make faster decisions. The company did note that the information given by the Usage API may not align with the Costs because of differences in how they record usage and spend, and as a result, it recommends companies not rely on it for any financial purposes.  The Usage API is available now, and more information on how to use it can be found in the API documentation . The post OpenAI launches Usage API to provide developers insights into costs appeared first on SD Times . from SD Times https://ift.tt/VBEkJpy

ScyllaDB, the database for predictable performance at scale, today announced ScyllaDB 2024.2, the first enterprise release featuring ScyllaDB’s new “tablets” replication architecture. This new architecture, part of a multiyear project to implement and extend the Raft consensus protocol, delivers unprecedented levels of elasticity and efficiency. It builds upon ScyllaDB’s signature shard-per-core architecture, which is known for providing predictable low latency at scale (e.g., steady single-digit millisecond P99 latency even with workloads exceeding 2M ops/sec). [ See tablets in action ] “In the era of AI, databases need to rapidly grow and shrink as millions of users access the applications powered by them,” explained ScyllaDB co-founder and CEO Dor Laor. “Often, teams are forced to overprovision the database to meet the demand. Elasticity speed is measured by how quickly a given deployment can start handling increased throughput and volume in production. With ScyllaDB’s elastic spee...

The number of security challenges companies are facing continue to grow, but organizations are beginning to display signs of “AppSec exhaustion,” or decreased engagement in security practices.  This is according to Snyk’s new State of Open Source report , which found that dependency tracking and code ship frequency has remained largely unchanged since last year. There was only a slight increase in the percentage of teams tracking all dependencies and a slight decrease in the number of teams only tracking direct dependencies.  The majority of companies who don’t track dependencies at all do run software composition analysis, which Snyk believes indicates that their tracking isn’t systematic but they do check dependencies and open source components for vulnerabilities.  There was also a stagnation in code ship frequency, which Snyk says is an indication that DevOps maturity has reached a plateau, as improved tooling and developer experience should facilitate faster code ...

Piling on to the list of announcements from Amazon at AWS re:Invent, the company announced Amazon Nova , a family of foundation models that promise “frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance.” They can handle typical generative AI tasks, such as analyzing documents and videos, understanding charts, generating video content, or building advanced AI agents.  “Whether you’re developing document processing applications that need to process images and text, creating marketing content at scale, or building AI assistants that can understand and act on visual information, Amazon Nova provides the intelligence and flexibility you need with two categories of models: understanding and creative content generation,” Danilo Poccia, chief evangelist at AWS, wrote in a blog post .  Its models are divided into “understanding models” and “content generation models.” There are three understanding models currently available, and they can take in text, image, or video as in...

At AWS re:Invent today, Amazon announced updates to its generative AI assistant for software developers, Amazon Q Developer.  There are three new agents that automate unit testing, documentation, and code reviews. Developers can make it generate a test by typing “/test” in the chat window or highlighting a specific block of code to test. It utilizes its overall knowledge of the project to generate the necessary tests for the code.  Similarly, developers can now type “/doc” in the chat window to get the assistant to automatically generate documentation and update README files. Developers can also ask questions about how their code works or ask it to improve existing documentation.  And finally, typing “/review” will make Amazon Q flag suspicious code patterns, identify open source package risks, and assess the impact of changes. They can also use “/q review” in GitLab Duo to have Amazon Q review their merge requests.  RELATED: AI agents are transforming the softwa...

  The AI platform Clarifai is attempting to make it easier for companies to leverage their existing cloud and hardware investments for AI. Clarifai already offers tools to assist throughout the whole AI lifecycle, including data labeling, training, evaluation, workflows, and feedback.  Now in public preview, Compute Orchestration provides companies with a single control plane for governing access to AI resources, monitoring performance, and managing costs. Customers can deploy any model using any hardware vendor in any cloud, on-premises, air-gapped, or SaaS environments, which is a major expansion of the deployment options Clarifai offers. According to Clarifai, Compute Orchestration uses clusters and nodepools to organize and manage compute resources. A compute cluster is the “overarching computational environment where models are executed,” while nodepools are a set of dedicated nodes within a cluster that share similar configurations. “Cluster configuration lets yo...

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced a number of new capabilities related to observability to help developers gain more visibility into their applications.  The company is introducing enhanced observability capabilities for container workloads running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). According to AWS, this announcement ties in with Container Insights, which was a capability introduced last year to improve container observability.  The new enhancements will enable customers to quickly identify root causes by viewing resource usage patterns and correlating telemetry data, proactively manage ECS resources using custom dashboards, track recent deployments and deployment failures, monitor resources across multiple accounts, and integrate with other CloudWatch services, like Application Signals and CloudWatch logs.  RELATED: AWS announces several updates to Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q during re:Invent “This new capability will help reduce your mean time to de...

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced a number of new capabilities for generative AI and machine learning. New evaluations for Amazon Bedrock Two new evaluation capabilities have been added to Amazon Bedrock , which is the company’s platform for building generative AI applications using foundation models.  Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now offer support for RAG evaluation (still in preview), which allows users to compare different configurations. Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now offers an LLM-as-a-judge feature (also in preview), which allows AI to perform tests and evaluate other models more quickly and cheaper than a human.  The evaluations provide a score of 0 to 1 and provide a natural language explanation for each score, as well as the rubric used to come to each score.  “These new capabilities make it easier to go into production by providing fast, automated evaluation of AI-powered applications, shortening feedback loops and speeding up improvements. These e...

The post-pandemic “new normal” radically reshaped the workplace with an emphasis on flexibility, hybrid or remote working, and digital rather than face-to-face interactions. Now the dust has settled, 2024 is arguably the first full year we’ll see the impact of this recalibration and the impact AI and automation will have on how we work. But a word of warning, the introduction of AI and automation will create new pressures for CIOs being pushed to do more with less/or the same. The result will be a difficult balancing act for CIOs as they juggle their organization’s need to grow, and embrace new tools, with the need to maintain a good company culture. Growth and culture: finding the perfect balance The new workplace is one where automation and AI will be front and center. This has caught the imagination of today’s CIOs looking to move faster and scale. There’s no part of the business that can’t be automated. But how can the CIO build the culture, skills, and mindset to align with thi...