OutSystems Mentor

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Mentor AI

OutSystems Mentor

“OutSystems x AI = Generative Software Cycle”

Mentor was unveiled at the OutSystems One Conference, held in Amsterdam from 15-17 October 2024. OutSystems describes it as an AI-driven SDLC collaborator. Mentor is actually the new name of Project Morpheus, an internal project at OutSystems that aimed to accelerate application development with Artificial Intelligence.

However, Mentor can do much more. According to OutSystems, it is the first digital collaborator to support the full Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC). The system combines the power of low-code and generative AI (GenAI) to generate, put into production and maintain applications.

ONE Conference

Of course, CoolProfs was also present at this year’s ONE conference, held at the RAI in Amsterdam. At our stand, we presented our automated SDLC pipeline and our vision of ODC (the Road to ODC). In addition, our consultants naturally attended the many technical seminars.

During his CEO Keynote, CEO & Founder Paulo Rosado explained how Mentor is transforming the development and management of OutSystems apps and making it a differentiator. In a subsequent, more technical session, Luis Blando and Dutch Sezen de Bruijn showed how you can have an entire application generated with a prompt and by uploading a requirements document. In a few minutes, and effectively without any programming knowledge.

Of course, the first question that arises is: ‘nice, but can you also edit and extend that generated app?’. And of course you can. This way, a developer can make a quick start with a new application or present a prototype. If it is decided to go ahead with development, a development team can simply continue working on it and add code or, for example, libraries. All this within the graphical, low-code OutSystems environment.

What can Mentor do?

Mentor reinforces the ‘shift left’ approach that CoolProfs has championed for years. Developers and the business create initial designs together and determine the look and feel, business logic and data models. Testability and options for independent roll-out of functionality are also taken into account at an early stage. Mentor helps with:

  • App development using AI. This speeds up development and, combined with OutSystems’ experience in this field, ensures high quality and security.
  • Automatic quality checks: a guarantee that applications meet the highest standards.
  • Embedded AI agents: these add advanced capabilities, such as natural language processing, without the need for extra work.
  • Iterative improvement: AI-driven suggestions enable continuous improvement.

Using AI-driven app generation, optimisation, automated quality checks and agents, all under the management of centralised IT, Mentor increases developer productivity. At the same time, it ensures that applications meet the highest quality standards. All this at a speed previously thought impossible.

What can Mentor NOT do?

For a start: there may be some confusion around the name. In fact, OutSystems – in version 11 – has an Architecture Dashboard that was later renamed to AI Mentor Studio. This tool analyses code quality and helps with architecture insights and the prevention of technical debt. OutSystems Mentor does take over that role, but it is much more than that: you can also use it to generate and maintain apps.

Another thing that Mentor is not: a simple way to save on expensive developers. To begin with, an AI system is not a replacement for a Business Analyst, Software Architect and/or developers. A key human task is to ask the business what exactly its requirements are regarding the software. Then build what is intended, not necessarily what was requested. We still need lots of developers to build and maintain applications.

In addition, bear in mind that Mentor, as well as other new functionality such as the AI Agent Builder, is only available on the ODC cloud platform. it is not available in OutSystems 11, which your organisation is probably using now. Mentor can only benefit you after the organisation has moved to ODC and possibly after all existing apps have been migrated or modified.

OutSystems, or high-code generated by AI?

Several GenAI systems can already generate high quality code, certainly to the level of an average developer. These systems use existing code examples and patterns to do so. As an organization, you really don’t know how good or how secure that code is. Thus, experienced developers are needed to analyse the code and monitor its quality. Given the large amount of code that can be generated by automated systems, the latter becomes a difficult task. There is a chance that huge ‘technical debt’ will be created, which must be addressed later. And how easy is it to extend the application without re-generating large parts of the code (and thus testing, checking for governance rules, etc.)?

This is where OutSystems has the upper hand. Mentor does allow you to generate (parts of) an app, but it does so based on templates and patterns that follow OutSystems best practices. The result is fully visual screens, aggregates or actions within the OutSystems low-code environment. These can easily be visually inspected, modified or extended by any developer.

By Onno Poelmeyer, Consultant, CoolProfs