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OutSystems, a global leader in high-performance application development, announced at its NextStep 2022 Software Innovation Conference the new OutSystems AI (Artificial Intelligence) Mentor System. This enhanced solution gives a comprehensive set of AI-based development, security and quality analysis tools that provide expert-level assistance across the most critical areas of the software development lifecycle. With AI Mentor System, IT teams can more easily optimise their architecture for performance, identify and fix security-related coding errors and minimise technical debt and wasted development time.

For more than four years, OutSystems has been infusing AI across the platform and the entire software development lifecycle to help developers, tech leads and architects create software much faster and with enterprise-grade quality. OutSystems AI Mentor System aids developers at every development step, providing intuitive, in-the-moment help when they need it. The AI Mentor System also automates repetitive tasks, eliminates tedious work and validates applications before they go into production to ensure they are built and maintained to the highest possible quality standards. Each of the AI Mentors serves as developers’ assistants, improving the development process for dramatic efficiency.

“The traditional software development approach needs to change, and our advanced AI literally shaves weeks and months off of the development process, while increasing the quality and security of every app,” said Gonçalo Gaiolas, Chief Product Officer at OutSystems. “The AI Mentor System is like having a team of experts enhancing and extending the collective expertise of your team. OutSystems is catching potential issues and serving up solutions for the dev team, so they can focus on creating awesome solutions. This System is a prime example of high-performance low-code, with the agility of a visual programming language and a powerful AI engine, supporting faster and more accurate development at every stage.”

AI Mentor System Capabilities

The OutSystems AI Mentor System is an evolution of the previous Architecture Dashboard within the OutSystems Platform, offering more robust capabilities and integrating new patent-pending AI technology. The solution includes the following Mentors:

• Code Mentor. Breakthrough AI-assisted development predicts what to do next, suggests the best option, and adds it to a developer’s code, fully configured and adapted to the business logic and context. Additionally, Code Mentor enables developers to use natural language to describe complex data required for an application and the built-in AI will automatically generate the proper SQL query, saving developers an enormous amount of time.
• Architecture Mentor. An AI-based enterprise architect that reviews code to ensure it meets critical architectural standards.
• Security Mentor. An AI-based security lead that reviews code to identify code vulnerabilities introduced during the development process.
• Performance Mentor. An AI-based performance expert that reviews code to identify possible performance bottlenecks and ensure that apps consistently perform at peak efficiency.
• Maintainability Mentor. An AI-based portfolio analyst that scans the company’s entire application portfolio looking for opportunities to reduce technical debt. The Maintainability Mentor is like having an AI-based development manager reviewing application code to root out duplicated code and suggesting opportunities to refactor applications.

“The biggest value (from AI Mentor System) is that it provides a top-down analysis of our code base, identifying areas in the architecture where best practices need to be applied,” said Scott Finkle, Vice President at McConkey Auction Group.  “We schedule a dashboard review every week to see the results so we can address the issues identified.  As a result, our code base is kept clean and is much easier for developers—especially new ones—to understand and work with. The categories are helpful for informing us of the areas we need internal training and where we have business and other risks. It is a significant asset to our developers as well as the business.”

Additional OutSystems Platform Updates

OutSystems released a series of additional enhancements that bring added power and flexibility to the platform:

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST). With the platform’s new SAST API, customers can automate security testing of application source code with third-party tools such as SonarQube amd OutSystems is the only leading low-code platform that supports SAST, an essential step in building strategic enterprise applications. Customers can join the OutSystems Early Access Program (EAP) to access these new features.
• OpenID Authentication for Platform Users. The OutSystems Platform has long supported third-party Identity Providers (IdPs), such as Okta or Azure Active Directory, for application users. Customers can now use their corporate-standard IdP—using the OpenID Connect standard—to authenticate platform users as well. Customers can leverage their existing IdP investments and implement sophisticated governance strategies for large-scale enterprise development teams.
• Expanding Enterprise Observability. While the OutSystems Platform includes sophisticated, built-in tools for application monitoring, customers increasingly want to standardize on a single tool for all their monitoring and observability requirements. This new capability moves application logs to a specialized logging subsystem and exposes these logs through the OpenTelemetry API. Customers will see new levels of performance for sophisticated monitoring regimens and out-of-the-box support for third-party monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace. Customers can join the OutSystems EAP to access these new features.
• Integration Builder support for MongoDB. OutSystems Integration Builder dramatically accelerates developers’ ability to connect apps to data sources through secure and scalable integrations. Until now, Integration Builders supported 13 common data sources such as SAP, Salesforce, Azure SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL—and now supports MongoDB. This is an important addition for customers that want to accelerate the development of applications that take advantage of NoSQL-based data. With Integration Builder, customers use wizard-style configuration to configure their MongoDB integrations without having to write a single line of code. Those integrations are scalable and secure and can be reused throughout a customer’s app portfolio.

Developers can experience these new features and access OutSystems with a free trial version and experience these capabilities by visiting the OutSystems page.

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