GitLab Duo: drive developer productivity with the power of AI

According to Gartner®, the Magic Quadrant™ for DevOps Platforms report states, 'By 2027, 75% of organisations will have switched from multiple point solutions to DevOps platforms to streamline application delivery, up from 25% in 2023. DevOps platforms and their consolidated, integrated capabilities are becoming a simpler alternative to DevOps toolchains.

GitLab is recognised as a Leader in this 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for DevOps Platforms.

GitLab's latest release, GitLab Duo, demonstrates another leap in technological advancement for DevSecOps.

If this is the first time you’ve crossed paths with GitLab Duo, you’ll want to get better acquainted. Let’s start with the basics of GitLab Duo.

GitLab Duo is a set of AI-powered capabilities within the GitLab platform. It provides an AI helping hand at every phase of the lifecycle to power your workflows. It supports developer, security, and ops teams by helping them develop code, improve operations, and secure software more efficiently.

One of the many benefits of GitLab is that it's a single application with built-in security, so you can have complete visibility across value streams with less need to jump between tasks. Plus, GitLab is scalable for enterprise and can integrate into your existing infrastructure. Win!

Ultimately, GitLab Duo increases team efficiency and reduces cycle times, enabling your teams to deliver more software securely and faster. Now, let's look at some of the top features that will help you to do your best DevOps.

Like any good wingman, GitLab Duo gives a helping hand at all stages of the software development lifecycle. Ultimately, its AI-assisted features solve key pain points, increase the speed of delivery, and empower developer productivity during the lifecycle.

GitLab aims to help you improve your workflow efficiency by up to ten times using the features of GitLab Duo. So, what are these features? Let's open the vault and take a look.

As your teams write or update code, Code suggestions recommends code that should come next, which can be accepted or ignored. This act helps developers create new code and update existing code faster and more efficiently, enhancing production code quality and leading to faster iterations and rollouts. It reduces errors and cognitive load, so developers can spend more time adding unique value to their applications.

This capability employs historical data, utilising trends across your development lifecycle to project the future behaviour of your value stream metrics. It is instrumental in identifying anomalies within your software development lifecycle and can provide pivotal insights for analysis and optimisation. For instance, it can forecast deployment frequency to production by examining past deployment patterns. By comprehending these historical trends, teams can predict and plan their future deployment schedules effectively, ensuring a seamless and efficient production process.

This feature facilitates faster and better quality reviews by automatically suggesting reviewers for your merge request. But it doesn't select just anyone. The list includes users knowledgeable about a specific aspect of the application and would be the best candidates to review the updates. It means developers save time by not having to search and identify the right reviewers for the job, streamlining the review process, and avoiding delays and low-quality reviews.

To provide valuable context to the merge request author in more efficient and time-saving ways, the reviewer can use the Code review summary feature to give authors context around feedback and suggestions. It helps to ease merge request handoff between authors and reviewers.

This capability examines code within a merge request and in the repository view, and explains it in a natural language that's easy to understand. It merges the code, helping all teams get up to speed quickly.

The feature can aid developers in creating more secure code by detailing a natural language description of the vulnerability, facilitating a better comprehension and resolution approach. In addition to illustrating the action steps required to remediate the vulnerability, this tool underscores the significance of fixing vulnerabilities, not only for defending an application against cyberattacks in the production environment, but also as a crucial measure against supply chain attacks. Therefore, this effort optimises securing applications, proving invaluable in safeguarding the application and its associated supply chain.

This feature can summarise up to hundreds of comments on an issue into a concise paragraph. It means a stakeholder participating in comment threads on an issue can quickly get caught up with the conversation, jump into the discussion, and become productive immediately.

The Chat feature provides quick answers to questions in a natural, conversational way. It helps you cut through large volumes of text in epics, code, issues, and GitLab documentation and get to what matters—the right information.

This capability helps you efficiently communicate the impact of your merge request changes. It's useful for collaborators who need to quickly catch up on changes or understand all of the updates included in a merge request.

Ultimately, GitLab Duo maximises your DevSecOps efforts and improves your dev teams' ability to deliver software quickly and reliably. In addition, it improves the experience of everyone involved in the lifecycle, and especially that of your developers.

Developer experience (sometimes called DevEx) is becoming a critical business focus. Many have caught on to the benefits of a positive DevEx. Increasing your DevEx can increase your developer's motivation levels, boost productivity and innovation, and even lead you to hire and keep the best teams. Providing your developers with a tool like GitLab Duo, which enables them to do their job better and have a better time doing it, is likely to positively impact your organisation’s DevEx.

Essentially, DevOps delivers value faster by shortening the software development life cycle. GitLab Duo and its AI-driven workflows empower your teams to push the limits of what's possible and maximise DevOps.

Ready to discover GitLab's new era of AI-powered DevSecOps workflows? For more information about how you can revolutionise your application lifecycle with GitLab Duo, contact us today.