Using Amazon Q Developer in developer workflows - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Design and planningCodingCode reviewIntegration and deployment

Using Amazon Q Developer in developer workflows

Developers follow a standard workflow encompassing the stages of requirement gathering, design and planning, coding, testing, code review, and deployment. This section focuses on how you can use Amazon Q Developer capabilities to optimize key development steps.

Code development tasks that Amazon Q Developer can do include design, writing, testing, and review.

The previous diagram shows how Amazon Q Developer can accelerate and streamline the following common tasks in stages of code development:

  • Design and planning | Environment setup | Code organization

    • Generate relevant libraries

    • Generate outlines of classes and functions

    • Ask Amazon Q for well-architected advice

    • Use Amazon Q to refactor code

  • Code writing | Debugging and profiling | Unit testing | Documentation

    • Generate popular algorithms

    • Receive in-line code recommendations

    • Ask Amazon Q to optimize and fix code

    • Generate debugging and profiling statements

    • Generate unit tests

    • Generate documentation and comments within scripts

  • Code review

    • Ask Amazon Q to explain code

    • Send code as prompt with questions to Amazon Q

Design and planning

After gathering business and technical requirements, developers design new, or extend existing, codebases. During this phase, Amazon Q Developer can assist developers to do the following tasks:

  • Generate relevant libraries and class and function outlines for well-architected advice.

  • Provide guidance for engineering, compatibility, and architectural design queries.

Coding

The coding process uses Amazon Q Developer to accelerate development in the following ways:

  • Environment setup - Install the AWS Toolkit in your integrated development environment (IDE) (for example, VS Code or IntelliJ). Then, use Amazon Q to generate libraries or receive setup suggestions based on your project goals. For more details, see Best practices for onboarding Amazon Q Developer.

  • Code organization - Refactor code or obtain organization recommendations from Amazon Q that align with your project objectives.

  • Code writing - Use in-line suggestions to generate code while developing or ask Amazon Q to generate code by using the Amazon Q chat panel in your IDE. For more details, see Best practices for code generation with Amazon Q Developer.

  • Debugging and profiling - Generate profiling commands, or use Amazon Q options like Fix and Explain to debug issues.

  • Unit testing - Provide code as a prompt to Amazon Q during a chat session and request applicable unit test generation. For more information, see Code examples with Amazon Q Developer.

  • Documentation - Use in-line suggestions to create comments and docstrings, or use the Explain option to generate detailed summaries for code selections. For more information, see Code examples with Amazon Q Developer.

Code review

Reviewers need to comprehend development code before promoting it to production. To accelerate this process, use the Amazon Q Explain and Optimize options, or send code selections with custom prompt instructions to Amazon Q in a chat session. For more information, see Chat examples.

Integration and deployment

Ask Amazon Q for guidance about continuous integration, delivery pipelines, and deployment best practices that are specific to your project's architecture.

Using these recommendations, you can learn to effectively harness Amazon Q Developer features, optimizing your workflows and increasing productivity across the entire development lifecycle.