What is AWS BugBust?

AWS Announces AWS BugBust: the world’s first global competition to find and fix 1 million software bugs.

AWS has announced the AWS BugBust Challenge, the world’s first global competition for developers to collectively eliminate one million software bugs. With just a few clicks, developers worldwide can join the challenge by creating an AWS BugBust event for their organisation in the Amazon CodeGuru console—and compete for prizes and prestige by identifying and fixing bugs in their applications. By fixing bugs and achieving cost savings for their organisations, developers climb the AWS BugBust leaderboard to receive achievement badges, exclusive prizes, and a chance for an expense-paid trip to attend AWS re:Invent 2021 in Las Vegas.

One of the most critical steps in software development is code reviews, which help ensure the correctness of code and the use of coding best practices. As codebases become larger, and new features are added to applications at a greater velocity, the volume and complexity of code reviews increases. This is why developers are constantly looking for better and less tedious ways to perform code reviews to make their applications more secure, reliable, and efficient. Some organisations hold bug bash events where teams collaborate to find and fix bugs, but these events require developers to spend most of the time manually inspecting large codebases, which limits the ability for teams to work together, share best practices, and eliminate large numbers of bugs.

AWS BugBust is the first global bug-busting challenge for developers to collectively eliminate 1 million software bugs and US$100mn in technical debt for their organisations using Amazon CodeGuru. Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool that uses machine learning to identify bugs and find the most expensive lines of code in applications. Amazon CodeGuru helps developers automate code reviews and application profiling with its two components, Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer (which uses machine learning to flag common issues in code and provide specific recommendations on remediation) and Amazon CodeGuru Profiler (which uses machine learning to identify the most expensive lines of code in applications). By participating in the AWS BugBust Challenge, customers can easily organise AWS BugBust events in the Amazon CodeGuru console. They can select their applications to profile and analyse and then invite their teams to participate in the event. Each time developers fix a bug and save money, they will score points to climb their organisation’s private BugBust leaderboard and see how they rank among their teammates. Each participant’s total number of bugs fixed and cost savings will be added to the global AWS BugBust leaderboard during the event. Each participant is eligible for profile badges, exclusive prizes, and a chance for an expense-paid trip to attend AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.

“Hundreds of thousands of AWS customers are building and deploying new features to applications each day at high velocity and managing complex code at high volumes. It’s difficult to get time from skilled developers to quickly perform effective code reviews since they’re busy building, innovating, and pushing out deployments,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon Machine Learning, AWS. “Today, we are excited to announce an entirely new approach to help developers improve code quality, eliminate bugs, and boost application performance, while saving millions of dollars in application resource costs. With the AWS BugBust Challenge, developers can use Amazon CodeGuru to spend less time finding common coding mistakes and more time having fun and competing to improve their applications and save their companies a lot of money.”

The AWS BugBust capability is available today in US East (N. Virginia) with availability in additional regions where Amazon CodeGuru is offered coming soon.

NextRoll helps marketplaces and marketing platforms grow revenue by empowering them to build and enhance their marketing solutions. “AWS BugBust has been such a fun way for our dev teams to systematically improve our code quality,” said Valentino Volonghi, CTO at NextRoll, Inc. “With AWS BugBust, not only are we able to increase the number of critical issues found before the application reaches customers, but we have reduced the code review time and helped our developers build new coding skills. And the best part is that they’re having fun doing it.”

As an AWS Advanced Consulting, QuickSight, and Well-Architected Partner, Belle Fleur has a proven track record of helping clients deliver high-quality, valuable software in an efficient, fast, and reliable manner with astounding results. “All of our customers want to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads under the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and gamifiying DevOps with AWS BugBust to make it easier is sheer genius!” said Tia Dubuisson, President at Belle Fleur Technologies. “Customers that want to score high in the operational excellence pillar can now take advantage of a joint AWS BugBust with Belle Fleur and use machine learning to inspect their code with Amazon CodeGuru and leave expensive and labour-intensive manual inspections behind. We are proud to be a launch partner to deliver Amazon CodeGuru to our customers from startups to enterprises so they can automate and drive DevOps excellence. Now they can use machine learning-powered insights with AWS BugBust to quickly find and fix bugs in a fun and engaging format and make their applications more reliable and secure while saving money. By using the most up-to-date technology and automating operations, our customers can reinvest time savings to advance other modernisation projects and recruit and retain new talent as they grow and scale their solutions on AWS.”

Founded in 1959, Miami Dade College is a public college in Miami, Florida, with eight campuses and twenty-one outreach centres throughout Miami-Dade County. “The AWS BugBust Challenge will be a fun and educative addition to our curriculum to help our students become more confident in their ability to use the Python programming language and take their IT careers to the next level,” said Antonio Delgado, Dean of Engineering, Technology and Design at Miami Dade College. “We plan to use AWS BugBust every semester as a platform for our students to showcase and enhance their coding skills, all while being part of an exciting bug-bashing event.”

Games For Love is a 501(c)(3) public charity dedicated to easing suffering, saving lives, and creating sustainable futures for children. “While code review is part of our development process, flaws sometimes pass through the inspection and verification phase before production,” said Nathan Blair, Founder and CEO at Games For Love. “AWS BugBust has revolutionised our code review process and empowered developers to get code quality right, uniformly, and enable them to celebrate their bug-bashing achievements. Moreover, our developers can use the machine learning-powered recommendations with Amazon CodeGuru to also improve their coding skills.”

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