Leveraging Amazon Q Developer for Efficient Code Debugging and Maintenance

In this post, we guide you through five common components of efficient code debugging. We also show you how Amazon Q Developer can significantly reduce the time and effort required to manually identify and fix errors across numerous lines of code. With Amazon Q Developer on your side, you can focus on other aspects of software development, such as design and innovation. This leads to faster development cycles and more frequent releases, as you as a software developer can allocate less time to debugging and more time to building new features and functionality.

Debugging is a crucial part of the software development process. It involves identifying and fixing errors or bugs in the code to ensure that it runs smoothly and efficiently in the production environment. Traditionally, debugging has been a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, requiring developers to manually search through lines of code to investigate and subsequently fix errors. With Amazon Q Developer, a generative AI–powered assistant that helps you learn, plan, create, deploy, and securely manage applications faster, the debugging process becomes more efficient and streamlined. This enables you to easily understand the code, detect anomalies, fix issues and even automatically generate the test cases for your application code.

Let’s consider the following code example, which utilizes Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to generate a speech explanation of a given prompt. A prompt is the message sent to a model in order to generate a response. It constructs a JSON payload with the prompt (for example – “explain black holes to 8th graders”) and configuration for the Claude model, and invokes the model via the Bedrock Runtime API. Amazon Polly converts the Large Language Model (LLM) response into an audio output format which is then uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket location:

Sample Code Snippet:

import boto3
import json
# Define boto clients
brt = boto3.client(service_name='bedrock-runtime')
polly = boto3.client('polly')
s3 = boto3.client('s3')
body = json.dumps({
"prompt": "\n\nHuman: explain black holes to 8th graders\n\nAssistant:",
"max_tokens_to_sample": 300,
"temperature": 0.1,
"top_p": 0.9,
})
# Define variable
modelId = 'anthropic.claude-v2'
accept = 'application/json'
contentType = 'application/json'
response = brt.invoke_model(body=body, modelId=modelId, accept=accept, contentType=contentType)
response_body = json.loads(response.get('body').read())
# Print response
print(response_body.get('completion'))
# Send response to Polly
polly_response = polly.synthesize_speech(
Text=response_body.get('completion'),
OutputFormat='mp3',
VoiceId='Joanna'
)
# Write audio to file
with open('output.mp3', 'wb') as file:
file.write(polly_response['AudioStream'].read())
# Upload file to S3 bucket
s3.upload_file('output.mp3', '<REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_BUCKET_NAME>', 'speech.mp3')

Top common ways to debug code:

1. Code Explanation:

The first step in debugging your code is to understand what the code is doing. Very often you have to build upon code from others. Amazon Q Developer comes with an inbuilt feature that allows it to quickly explain the selected code and identify the main components and functions. This feature utilizes natural language processing (NLP) and summarization capability of LLMs, making your code easy to understand, and helping you identify potential issues. To gain deeper insights into your codebase, simply select your code, right-click and select ‘Send to Amazon Q’ option from menu. Finally, click on “Explain” option.

Amazon Q Developer generates an explanation of the code, highlighting the key components and functions. You can then use this summary to quickly identify potential issues and minimize your debugging efforts. It demonstrates how Amazon Q Developer accepts your code as input and the summarizes it for you. It explains the code in a natural language, which can help developers understand and debug the code.

If you have any follow-up question regarding the given explanation, you can also ask Amazon Q Developer for more in-depth review of a specific task. With respect to the code context, Amazon Q Developer automatically understands the existing code functionality and provides more insights. We ask Amazon Q Developer to explain how the Amazon Polly service is being used for synthesizing in the sample code snippet. It provides detailed step-by-step clarification from the retrieval to the upload process. Using this approach, you can ask any clarifying questions similar to asking a colleague to help you better understand a topic.

2. Amplify debugging with Logs

The sample code is deficient in terms of support for debugging including proper exception handling mechanisms. This makes it difficult to identify and handle issues during the execution or runtime of the application, further causing delays in the overall development process. You can instruct Amazon Q Developer to add a new code block for debugging your application against potential failures. Amazon Q Developer analyzes the existing code and then recommends to add a new code snippet to include printing and logging of debug messages and exception handling. It embeds ‘try-except’ blocks to catch potential exceptions that may occur. You use the recommended code after reviewing and modifying it. For example, you need to update the variable REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_BUCKET_NAME with your actual Amazon S3 bucket name.

With Amazon Q, you seamlessly enhance your codebase by selecting specific code segments and providing them as prompts. This enables you to explore suggestions for incorporating the required exception handling mechanisms or strategic logging statements.

Logs are an essential tool for debugging your application code. They allow you to track the execution of your code and identify where errors are occurring. With Amazon Q Developer, you can view and analyze log data from your application, and identify issues and errors that may not be immediately apparent from the code. It demonstrates that the given code does not have the logging statements embedded.

You can provide a prompt to Amazon Q Developer in the chat window asking it to write a code to enable logging and add log statements. This will automatically add logging statements wherever needed. It is useful to log inputs, outputs, and errors when making API calls or invoking models. You may copy the entire recommended code to the clipboard, review it, and then modify as needed. For example, you can decide which logging level you want to use, INFO or DEBUG.

3. Anomaly Detection

Another powerful use case for Amazon Q Developer is anomaly detection in your application code. Amazon Q Developer uses machine learning algorithms to identify unusual patterns in your code and highlight potential issues. It can detect issues that may be difficult to detect, such as an array out of bounds, infinite loops, or concurrency issues. For demonstration purposes, we intentionally introduce a simple anomaly in the code. We ask Amazon Q Developer to detect the anomaly in the code when attempting to generate text from the response. A simple prompt about detecting anomalies in the given code generates a useful output. It is able to detect the anomaly in the ‘response_body’ dictionary. Additionally, Amazon Q Developer recommends best practices to check the status code and handle the errors with a code snippet.

With code anomaly detection at your fingertips, you can promptly identify issues that may be impacting the application’s performance or user experience.

4. Automated Bug Fixing

After conducting all the necessary analysis, you can use Amazon Q Developer to fix bugs and issues in the code. Amazon Q Developer’s automated bug-fixing feature saves you hours you would otherwise spend on debugging and testing the code without its help. Starting with the code example which has an anomaly, you can identify and fix the code issue by simply selecting the code and sending it to Amazon Q Developer to apply fixes.

Amazon Q Developer identifies and suggests various ways to fix common issues in your code, such as syntax errors, logical errors, and performance issues. It can also recommend optimizations and improvements to your code, helping you to deliver a better user experience and improve your application’s performance.

5. Automated Test Case Generation

Testing is an integral part of code development and debugging. Running high quality test cases improve the quality of the code. With Amazon Q Developer, you can automatically generate the test cases quickly and easily. Amazon Q Developer uses its Large Language Model core to generate test cases based on your code, identifying potential issues and ensuring that your code is comprehensive and reliable.

With automated test case generation, you save time and effort while testing your code, ensuring that it is robust and reliable. A natural language prompt is sent to Amazon Q Developer to suggest test cases for given application code. You can notice that Amazon Q Developer provides a list of possible test cases that can aid in debugging and generating further test cases.

After receiving suggestions for test cases, you can also ask Amazon Q Developer to generate code snippet for some or all of the identified test cases.

Conclusion:

Amazon Q Developer revolutionizes the debugging process for developers by leveraging advanced and natural language understanding and generative AI capabilities. From explaining and summarizing code to detecting anomalies, implementing automatic bug fixes, and generating test cases, Amazon Q Developer streamlines common aspects of debugging. Developers can now spend less time manually hunting for errors and more time innovating and building features. By harnessing the power of Amazon Q, organizations can accelerate development cycles, improve code quality, and deliver superior software experiences to their customers.

To get started with Amazon Q Developer for debugging today navigate to Amazon Q Developer in IDE and simply start asking questions about debugging. Additionally, explore Amazon Q Developer workshop for additional hands-on use cases.

For any inquiries or assistance with Amazon Q Developer, please reach out to your AWS account team.

About the authors: