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InfoQ Homepage News AWS Introduces AWS Bugbust - a Global Competition to Fix One Million Bugs

AWS Introduces AWS Bugbust - a Global Competition to Fix One Million Bugs

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Recently, AWS announced a global challenge to fix one million bugs and reduce technical debt by over $100 million with AWS BugBust. The solution utilizes ML-powered developer tools - Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer and Amazon CodeGuru Profiler - to automatically scan code to weed out bugs, and gamifies fixing and eliminating them.

With BugBust, developers can create and manage private events that will transform and gamify the process of finding and fixing bugs in their software. The solution includes automated code analysis - behind the scenes, Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer and Amazon CodeGuru Profiler do the heavy lifting by leveraging machine learning and automated reasoning to find bugs in developers' applications. Furthermore, BugBust offers built-in leaderboards, custom challenges, and rewards. Note that Amazon CodeGuru only supports Python and Java – and thus, for developers to compete in the global challenge, their projects must be written in one of these languages.

Source: https://console.aws.amazon.com/codeguru/bugbust/#/home

Companies can use BugBust and start an event – it will present a list of bugs to developers. Then, they can claim bugs, fix them and earn points. For example, Martin Beeby, a principal advocate for Amazon Web Services, explains in an AWS News blog post on BugBust:

As a developer, each time you fix a bug in a private event, points are allocated and added to the global leaderboard. 

In addition, he wrote:

As developers reach significant individual milestones, they receive badges and collect exclusive prizes from AWS; for example, if they achieve 100 points they will win an AWS BugBust T-shirt and if they earn 2,000 points they will win an AWS BugBust Varsity Jacket. In addition, on the 30th of September 2021, the top 10 developers on the global leaderboard will receive a ticket to AWS re:Invent.

On a Hacker News thread about BugBust, a respondent answered a question about who would benefit apart from AWS:

The companies that put up the contest benefit. For a lot of people at a lot of companies, a trip to re:invent is a huge prize. If your job is to fix bugs anyway, now your company just incentivized you to do it more and in your off time to win that prize. Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard because job recruiters will most likely use the leaderboard for lead gen. If you're looking to make a job move, moving up on the leaderboard will help.

And Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon.com, stated in his blog post about BugBust:

AWS BugBust is a force multiplier in how many bugs you can fix and how many applications you can improve. It's also a game-changer in reducing resource costs. We're always trying to find ways for our customers to save money, and with BugBust, we're gamifying it so customers can have fun while watching their bills shrink.

Currently, developers can create AWS BugBust events in the Amazon CodeGuru console in the US East (N. Virginia) Region - and will soon be rolled out in any region that supports Amazon CodeGuru. Furthermore, all costs incurred by the underlying usage of Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer and Amazon CodeGuru Profiler are free of charge for 30 days per AWS account – and after that period, costs are incurred utilizing those CodeGuru capabilities. The pricing details of Amazon CodeGuru are available on the pricing page.

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