Increasing Engineering Productivity by 20% Using Amazon Q Developer with Boomi

More than 23,000 customers worldwide use Boomi’s iPaaS solutions for integration, automation, data, and AI as their organizations undergo digital transformation. The company aims to innovate to provide more value to customers, but it found that its developers were spending 40 percent of their time on repetitive tasks related to writing code, testing, drafting documentation, managing releases, maintaining the tool chain, and deploying code. “We wanted to use AI capabilities to take away some of the drudgery in the day-to-day life of a software engineer,” says Thomas Benjamin, senior vice president of product development and engineering at Boomi.

Boomi’s generative AI strategy includes developing solutions to benefit two key personas in the company: developers and salespeople. The company’s leadership is focused on innovating with AI and staying on the cutting edge of technology. “Our CEO is keen to get this powerful technology into the hands of the persona groups in our company who are best placed to take advantage of it,” says Sean Wechter, chief information officer at Boomi.

Boomi uses AWS to develop its iPaaS solutions, and it wanted a user-friendly generative AI tool that would work with its existing development environment and source code repository. IT collected several coding assistant solutions and explored them with a pilot program, which involved a 20-developer team testing and scoring the solutions for three use cases: writing high-quality code, producing context-aware code documentation, and undertaking unit testing for the code. At the end of the pilot program, Amazon Q Developer—one of the most capable generative AI–powered assistants for software development—had the highest scores, indicating that it was the best fit for Boomi’s needs.

After the 30-day pilot program, Boomi focused on democratizing AI and driving adoption across the organization through effective change management. It organized hackathons and AWS Solutions-Focused Immersion Days with AWS solutions experts so that its broader engineering team could learn more about Amazon Q Developer and the best practices and resources for using it effectively. Through the workshops, Boomi rolled out the solution across the organization to its 445 developers. “We wanted to roll the technology out by helping teams see the value in it and adopt it,” says Benjamin. “It really helped unblock our teams, and team members now help each other by sharing and democratizing best practices.”

Using a chat interface available in their integrated development environment, developers can interact with Amazon Q Developer while writing code and receive in-line suggestions to improve code quality. The user-friendly interface is context-aware and understands the files and languages the developer is using. Along with coding, Boomi also uses Amazon Q Developer to run unit tests and to generate context-aware documentation that developers can use for implementation and troubleshooting.

Additionally, developers use Amazon Q Developer to run security scans on code as it is being developed. That way, any issues can be identified and fixed right then, saving developer time and effort in the long run. “The best time to fix code in terms of cost is before it is checked into our source code repository,” says Benjamin. “It is a big asset to have access to security scanning in Amazon Q Developer at the code generation point, and we use that as much as possible.”

About 40 percent of the engineering team uses Amazon Q Developer, and 20 percent of the code generated by them is through the solution. “The happy faces of developers who would use the service was the top criterion for selecting it,” says Wechter. “Writing great code is only part of the equation; the success factor of Amazon Q Developer is that it fits developers’ workflows—they actually use it.” Adoption among the engineering team is increasing, and the team comes up with new ways of using the technology for added functionality and features. The team is also more proactive in identifying issues with code, which translates to a better customer experience.

Amazon Q Developer has helped increase the productivity of the engineering team by 20 percent, freeing up time to focus on projects that add value for customers. “Our goal in engineering is to embrace the world of AI agents,” says Benjamin. “I want our engineering teams to focus on evolving our designs so that we can meet the demands that AI agents will place on our systems, because doing so will help make customers’ lives better.”

During development, Boomi also shared feedback with the AWS team. “The nimbleness of the Amazon Q Developer team was most impressive,” says Benjamin. “Top AWS experts had office hours with our teams, and developers got quick turnaround over chat in regard to any questions.” The AWS team helped Boomi resolve issues quickly. “The team provided us a patch for our issues in 30 days, and the list of additional features we asked for was delivered in 45 days,” says Benjamin. The prompt support helped Boomi speed up its advancement and more quickly see benefits from using the coding agent.

Boomi gained 99.99 percent availability of its services and improved resilience on AWS, which it will maintain as it develops more generative AI use cases for its more than 23,000 iPaaS customers and internal teams. It is exploring anomaly detection through AI and using AI agents to help cloud operations teams, site reliability engineers, and other deployment teams as well as end customers. “This is a momentous time of change, which opens up a lot of opportunity for Boomi,” says Luke Hagstrand, head of enterprise AI at Boomi. “It’s a great time to be a builder. Our use of AWS empowers our developers and continues to support the trajectory of this business.”