AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
AI-Driven DevOps: Quality and Compliance with Inflectra and HAQM Bedrock
By Adam Sandman, CEO – Inflectra
By Jessica Moore, Director of Global Alliances – Inflectra
By CJ Sturgess, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Bhavye Sharma, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Inflectra |
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In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises are balancing innovation with quality and compliance standards. The power of AI in development and operations (DevOps) is transforming how organizations modernize while still maintaining their compliancy requirements.
Regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and utilities can balance accelerated software delivery with their compliance requirements through tools and processes. As these industries transition from on-premises to cloud-based solutions, they modernize their testing, quality assurance, and compliance processes to align with AI-enhanced development capabilities.
Generative AI (gen AI) tools and services like HAQM Q Developer and HAQM SageMaker AI have enhanced developer productivity. Organizations now can modernize their quality control processes to complement these development capabilities. Aligning these processes helps organizations maintain both innovation momentum and their regulatory compliance posture.
DevOps Shift to Cloud
Over the past several years, there has been a seismic shift towards cloud-based DevOps. Whereas companies previously favored on-premises development using continuous integration (CI) tools, they are increasingly migrating to cloud-based DevOps using environments such as GitLab and GitHub. This transformation marks a fundamental change in how enterprises approach software development and delivery.
This transformation has created a thriving marketplace where cloud providers, Independant Software Vendors (ISV), and system integrators collaborate to deliver comprehensive solutions that address the growing needs of modern enterprises. Modernizing DevOps is crucial for businesses, and ISVs play an increasingly vital role in their success.
Generative AI Increasing Speed over Quality
Since the popularization of gen AI in 2022, one of the most compelling business use cases has been its application in software development, particularly in reading and writing code. This breakthrough has implications for businesses across many industries.
The productivity benefits of gen AI tools and services are substantial. AI services and integrations could boost developer productivity by as much as 45 percent, according to estimates. This translates to faster development cycles, reduced time-to-market, and a more efficient use of human resources.
Gen AI is also revolutionizing the coding process itself. Natural language has increasingly become the new coding language, with AI systems capable of turning human instructions into functional code on-demand. This democratizes software development, potentially allowing non-technical staff to contribute to the development process and further reduces the barrier to entry for creating custom software solutions.
The rapid increase in developer productivity creates opportunities to develop testing, quality, and compliance processes. This is especially relevant for regulated industries, where robust quality assurance and compliance posture helps protect business value and maintain customer trust.
How Does Inflectra Help Customers?
Inflectra and AWS collaborate to deliver quality management and compliance solutions that help customers create and release their most important technology products on time and with the highest quality. Inflectra leverages the AWS global infrastructure to provide customers with a trusted, scalable solution for managing their entire software development and testing lifecycle.
The Inflectra suite includes capabilities for managing requirements, test cases, resources, risks and automating all aspects of the entire software development and testing lifecycle. For regulated industries, their AWS-based cloud solution provides the perfect balance of agility and control. Customers benefit from complete traceability, robust audit trails, and comprehensive compliance documentation, all while maintaining the speed and flexibility needed in modern software development.
This collaboration verifies customers receive a complete solution that combines Inflectra’s domain expertise with the proven operational expertise of AWS, enabling them to deliver quality without compromise in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape.
Bridging the Agility Gap with Spira
The Inflectra Spira platform is a modern alternative to legacy DevOps tools, providing a comprehensive environment for managing product and program backlogs, testing, traceability, risks, and compliance. Spira is transforming cloud-based DevOps workflows by enhancing automation, collaboration, and security on the AWS Cloud, including integration with other AWS Partners such as GitLab. Figure 1 shows how Spira helps customers bridge the gaps between development and validation, and between agility and compliance.
Figure 1: Bridging the Agility Gap with Spira
As illustrated in Figure 2, the Spira platform’s three editions (SpiraPlan,SpiraTeam, SpiraTest) offer project stakeholders a unified interface for overseeing and managing project status.
Figure 2: Observe Project Health with Spira
From requirements ideation and analysis to release planning, development, testing, and validation, Spira connects key information. Customers can see in real-time the bottlenecks on a project, the risks needing mitigation, and overall solution quality.
With the SpiraPlan edition, program managers, VPs, and C-level stakeholders can create program portfolios that link project deliverables to key company capabilities, milestones, and strategic objectives. This gives agile teams the flexibility to deliver, while providing senior management the visibility and transparency to plan and course-correct where necessary.
Introducing Generative AI Assistants into Spira with AWS
We have incorporated world-leading AI capabilities into Spira to help product owners, managers, and testers increase their capacity and align their cadence with that of their development team. This new functionality uses foundational large language models (LLMs) (such as Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama) hosted on HAQM Bedrock to reduce the time spent on non-development tasks.
This functionality harnesses the power of gen AI to help customers generate test cases and test scripts, write scenarios, identify potential risks, and more as shown in Figure 3. The gen AI assistant will identify test cases that otherwise might be missed by the team. By leveraging the benefits of a human-AI team, development activity time can be reduced by as much as 50 percent and test coverage increased by approximately 40 percent.
Figure 3: Generate Test Cases, Tasks, Scenarios, and Identify Risks with Spira
Many developers spend an average of just one hour each day coding. Their remaining time is often spent on non-development tasks including writing test cases, creating test scripts, identifying risks, and decomposing high-level requirements into project tasks. They also identify various use cases and scenarios. With Spira’s new gen AI functionality, these mundane and often error-prone tasks are accelerated for the entire project team.
The Customer Journey with Inflectra
Many of our key customers have followed the same journey. First using the Spira platform to migrate away from their legacy application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions, then looking to embrace gen AI in a safe and responsible way.
Land Registration Systems (LARES) is one such customer that highlights the impact of modernizing DevOps practices. Leading a modernization project in land registration for the Philippines, LARES faced challenges in test management and automation. Therefore, they required a complete solution that addressed their challenges in handling complex data, and maintain security and regulatory compliance.
LARES opted to migrate away from their legacy Microfocus ALM and Unified Functional Testing (UFT) suite to Spira’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution hosted on AWS. Specifically, SpiraTeam was selected for its advanced software development lifecycle (SDLC) governance capabilities and Rapise for its superior test automation capabilities. This solution enabled LARES to leverage Spira’s generative AI functionality to realize a 30-40 percent productivity uplift in both manual test case creation and automation scripts development.
At Inflectra, like AWS, we believe in customer obsession. We see great value in offering customers the convenience and power of gen AI both within the Spira SaaS solution or by integrating with an HAQM Bedrock LLM as shown in Figure 4. Supported models include HAQM Nova, Meta’s Llama 3, or Anthropic’s Claude Haiku/Sonnet. For our customers in high-assurance industries, this flexibility lets them choose the best deployment model that aligns with their needs and regulatory requirements.
Figure 4: Spira gen AI architecture
Conclusion
As generative AI continues to influence the software development lifecycle, the roles and responsibilities of developers, testers, and project managers will likely evolve. Quality assurance, validation, and compliance remain essential components of this evolution. Organizations can benefit from adopting tools and services that help streamline processes, support traceability requirements, and extend AI capabilities to quality and compliance aspects of the software development lifecycle.
Check out more AWS Partners, speak with an AWS Partner Specialist, or contact an AWS Representative to learn how we can help accelerate your business.
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Inflectra – AWS Partner Spotlight
Inflectra is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Competency Partner that provides comprehensive software delivery and quality assurance solutions for both cloud and on-premise deployments. Inflectra’s integrated portfolio of application lifecycle management (ALM), testing, and automated testing platforms helps organizations speed up development while maintaining quality standards. Inflectra offers end-to-end traceability and agility in the software development lifecycle through seamless cloud deployment and extensive plugin capabilities.