The AI-Enabled SDLC

Chapter 6. Resolving Bugs with AI

SDAs provide significant value in the early stages of the SDLC by helping to simplify and automate developing a product. In addition, they also can help reduce the time and stress of dealing with problems found in the code. Many of the same techniques and approaches that you’ve seen in the previous chapters also apply when dealing with bugs. This includes leveraging integrated functionality to quickly resolve basic problems identified by your development environment.

Fixing Issues Flagged in Your IDE with AI

The most obvious and immediate kinds of problems to be solved are syntax errors or warnings introduced when coding. These are the ones flagged by your IDE. They are also the ones most easily solved with an SDA’s built-in functionality.

For example, suppose we have a section of code written in Go like the following:

opts == zap.Options{
        Development: True,
    }
opts.BindFlags(flag.CmdLine)
flag.Parse()

The Go integration with Visual Studio Code flags opts, True, and CmdLine as undefined. Without AI, we would need to either consult someone, search for examples, or try to debug through the IDE’s fix capabilities (if they exist). This could be time-consuming as we try to debug and resolve each issue in turn without causing other problems.

However, with the SDA, we can simply highlight the code inline and select one of the integrated fix options. For example, Tabnine and Copilot both have shortcut options to fix code available through the IDE’s ...