Announcing Tabnine’s upgraded AI test agent

Automate the creation of comprehensive test plans with our newest AI agent

We’re excited to announce the availability of a new generation of our AI test agent, designed to significantly enhance your test coverage by automating the creation of comprehensive test plans. 

Tabnine’s new AI test agent generates comprehensive test plans with detailed test cases for functions, and methods. Simply invoke the test agent using the CodeLens quick access link functionality, select an existing test file (or ask Tabnine to create a new one), and Tabnine automatically generates test cases covering a variety of testing scenarios. Test cases include a short description in plain English, making it easy to scan through quickly and select the ones you want to deploy. 

Like with all our AI agents (such as our onboarding Code Explorer agent, documentation, and code fix agents), Tabnine leverages the context of your project and codebase (including locally available code and information from the IDE and integration with your team’s full codebase) to generate tests that are highly accurate and personalized to your software. Additionally, Tabnine’s AI test agent is highly flexible; you can expand each test case to review the code and ask Tabnine to refine the test case to tailor it to your specific needs. Similarly, you can ask Tabnine to generate test cases for any specific scenarios that are missing in the original test plan. Once they’re complete, easily insert the desired test cases into your project with a single click and run them as part of a testing suite. This helps you to stay organized and use Tabnine as part of your existing testing workflows.

Automating testing with AI improves code quality

Unit testing is one of the most critical aspects of the software development life cycle as it enables developers to detect issues early, builds confidence in the code that they’re creating, and leads to a better code quality. Many companies utilize a manual testing approach, but this methodology has several limitations especially for larger engineering teams. Manual testing is time intensive and leads to longer release cycles, is prone to errors, is resource intensive and expensive for large projects, and often results in incomplete test coverage because it’s difficult to come up with tests that span all possible scenarios. 

Additionally, manual testing can be a drain on developer productivity.  Surveys indicate that developers often spend ~ 20% of their time on writing and maintaining tests. Writing tests is a task that developers enjoy the least because they’d rather spend their limited time on higher priority projects. As developers continue to accelerate code creation, companies often struggle to keep their test strategies up to date.

Tabnine’s new test agent leverages AI to automate test creation, enabling you to expand your test coverage.

Tabnine makes it easier for developers to create unit tests for new features, increasing test coverage and ensuring the code works as expected before integrating it with the main branch. Developers no longer have to spend time coming up with all the possible testing scenarios and its associated test code — they can simply offload this task to Tabnine. Similarly, when refactoring existing code, the test agent helps generate updated tests to validate changes and prevent regressions. Plus, for legacy code, with no or very limited unit test cases, the AI agent can generate comprehensive test suites to improve confidence in the codebase.

Tabnine’s AI test agent boosts developer productivity and happiness by reducing the time developers spend on writing tests,, helps speed up release cycles, and contributes to cost savings by reducing the need for manual testing.

Check out these short videos to see the new test agent in action:

• Automatically create a comprehensive test plan: Trigger the new test agent using CodeLens functionality in your IDE. Specify if you want to use an existing test file or want Tabnine to create a new one. Once you hit Continue, Tabnine generates a comprehensive test plan with detailed test cases for your functions, and methods. All the test cases come with a short description that make it easy to go through quickly and select the ones you need. Once you expand the desired test cases, Tabnine generates its code and you can then insert it in your test file.

• Easily modify test cases or add new ones: You can ask Tabnine in natural language to modify any of the test cases to meet your specific needs. Additionally, if any test case is missing, you can ask Tabnine to generate it and the test case gets added to the original test plan.

• Generate more personalized test cases: Tabnine also allows you to select an existing test file when creating a test plan. If you choose this option, Tabnine generates a test plan with test cases that use your existing standards and frameworks. Additionally, Tabnine doesn’t recreate any existing test cases, thereby preventing any duplication.

Get started with Tabnine’s latest AI test agent

The new test agent is available to all Tabnine customers — simply update your IDE plug-in to start using it. Check out our Docs to learn more about how to use this new agent. Not yet a customer? Sign up for free today.