Altisource boosts developer productivity by 25% with Amazon Q Developer

Growing demand in the US mortgage and real estate market added new complexity to Altisource’s operations. Its development teams needed to support rising volumes while continuing to work with long-established enterprise systems designed for earlier business needs. Over time, these systems became large and sophisticated, requiring careful updates to avoid disruptions. As a result, introducing new features could take 9–12 months, with teams spending considerable effort on maintenance and addressing static scan findings before release. These evolving pressures made it challenging for Altisource to accelerate delivery and keep pace with its wide network of stakeholders.

Altisource needed a faster, more efficient way to modernize software delivery and update existing applications. “Our objective was to deliver more value to our business units without increasing expense,” says Richard Hanagan, vice president and head of Cloud Product Development at Altisource.

To advance its development processes, Altisource introduced generative AI into its existing AWS environment and incorporated Amazon Q Developer—generative AI–powered assistant for software development—into its workflow. With prior experience using AI-powered assistants, the team used Amazon Q Developer to accelerate work across large legacy applications and speed up new development. “Amazon Q Developer using Claude Sonnet 4.5 was a game changer for us because it had the capabilities to support the modernization of our large legacy applications,” says Hanagan.

Altisource worked closely with AWS through Immersion Day workshops that helped the team validate its implementation approach and build confidence with Amazon Q Developer. These sessions clarified best practices, highlighted different adoption paths, and supported teams as they learned how to work effectively with the tool.

As internal adoption grew, early users began refactoring functions and experimenting with code generation through Amazon Q Developer. Their progress encouraged wider interest across development teams, and internal champions helped others get started. Adoption accelerated significantly once Altisource deployed MCP servers to connect Amazon Q Developer to Jira, Bitbucket, Figma, and its database servers. With these integrations in place, Amazon Q Developer can reference real project data, pull context from design files, and work across the full stack during development tasks.

Altisource then formalized an AI-driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC), enabling Amazon Q Developer agents to access codebases, project information, and design artifacts for fully context-aware development. Developers use the tool to analyze entire applications, document logic, and propose changes spanning both frontend interfaces and backend endpoints.

“Moving into an AI-DLC was a step change for us,” says Hanagan. “Amazon Q Developer didn’t just refactor isolated lines of code—it understood the entire codebase and pulled context from Jira, Bitbucket, and our design files.”

With Amazon Q Developer, Altisource accelerated innovation and strengthened its competitive edge to capture new business. Developers modernized more than 350,000 lines of legacy Java code using the AI-powered service and delivered four new applications in just four months—dramatically shortening release cycles. “We can show business stakeholders new functionality in days because Amazon Q Developer shortens the time it takes to deliver change,” says Hanagan.

One modernization team achieved a productivity boost of up to 25 percent, and the three-month Scrum story point average for software engineers increased from around 160 to 200 points. “With Amazon Q Developer, it’s like having a principal architect on your shoulder—the one giving you historical context and filling in the knowledge gaps,” adds Hanagan.

Altisource also improved code quality and operational efficiency by automating key development processes. Code vulnerabilities have decreased by 54 percent, static scans are surfacing fewer issues, and teams are completing large-scale modernizations with zero downtime—significantly reducing technical debt. Hanagan says, “I’ve never been more excited in my 30-plus years in this industry—Amazon Q Developer isn’t just accelerating development; it’s changing mindsets.”