Introducing new self-paced courses to improve Java and Python code quality with Amazon CodeGuru

During the software development lifecycle, organizations have adopted peer code reviews as a common practice to keep improving code quality and prevent bugs from reaching applications in production. Developers traditionally perform those code reviews manually, which causes bottlenecks and blocks releases while waiting for the peer review. Besides impacting the teams’ agility, it’s a challenge to maintain a high bar for code reviews during the development workflow. This is especially challenging for less experienced developers, who have more difficulties identifying defects, such as thread concurrency and resource leaks.

With Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, developers have an automated code review tool that catches critical issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs during application development. CodeGuru Reviewer is powered by pre-trained machine learning (ML) models and uses millions of code reviews on thousands of open-source and Amazon repositories. It also provides recommendations on how to fix issues to improve code quality and reduces the time it takes to fix bugs before they reach customer-facing applications. Java and Python developers can simply add Amazon CodeGuru to their existing development pipeline and save time and reduce the cost and burden of bad code.

If you’re new to writing code or an experienced developer looking to automate code reviews, we’re excited to announce two new courses on CodeGuru Reviewer. These courses, developed by the AWS Training and Certification team, consist of guided walkthroughs, gaming elements, knowledge checks, and a final course assessment.

About the course

During these courses, you learn how to use CodeGuru Reviewer to automatically scan your code base, identify hard-to-find bugs and vulnerabilities, and get recommendations for fixing the bugs and security issues. The course covers CodeGuru Reviewer’s main features, provides a peek into how CodeGuru finds code anomalies, describes how its ML models were built, and explains how to understand and apply its prescriptive guidance and recommendations. Besides helping on improving the code quality, those recommendations are useful for new developers to learn coding best practices, such as refactor duplicated code, correct implementation of concurrency constructs, and how to avoid resource leaks.

The CodeGuru courses are designed to be completed within a 2-week time frame. The courses comprise 60 minutes of videos, which include 15 main lectures. Four of the lectures are specific to Java, and four focus on Python. The courses also include exercises and assessments at the end of each week, to provide you with in-depth, hands-on practice in a lab environment.

Week 1

During the first week, you learn the basics of CodeGuru Reviewer, including how you can benefit from ML and automated reasoning to perform static code analysis and identify critical defects from coding best practices. You also learn what kind of actionable recommendations CodeGuru Reviewer provides, such as refactoring, resource leak, potential race conditions, deadlocks, and security analysis. In addition, the course covers how to integrate this tool on your development workflow, such as your CI/CD pipeline.

Topics include:

• What is Amazon CodeGuru?
• How CodeGuru Reviewer is trained to provide intelligent recommendations
• CodeGuru Reviewer recommendation categories
• How to integrate CodeGuru Reviewer into your workflow

Week 2

Throughout the second week, you have the chance to explore CodeGuru Reviewer in more depth. With Java and Python code snippets, you have a more hands-on experience and dive into each recommendation category. You use these examples to learn how CodeGuru Reviewer looks for duplicated lines of code to suggest refactoring opportunities, how it detects code maintainability issues, and how it prevents resource leaks and concurrency bugs.

Topics include (for both Java and Python):

• Common coding best practices
• Resource leak prevention
• Security analysis

Get started

Developed at the source, this new digital course empowers you to learn about CodeGuru from the experts at AWS whenever, wherever you want. Advance your skills and knowledge to build your future in the AWS Cloud. Enroll today:

• Udemy: Improve your Java Code using Amazon CodeGuru
• Udemy: Improve your Python Code using Amazon CodeGuru
• edX: Improve your Java Code using Amazon CodeGuru
• edX: Improve your Python Code using Amazon CodeGuru
• training: Improve Code Quality with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer