During your presentation you showed that the Code Generator is one of NEUROPUBLIC’s core technologies. More specifically, it is the technology that rendered NEUROPUBLIC as one of the most competitive IT companies. What was the need that led NEUROPUBLIC to this radical technological renovation?
The complex and demanding information systems developed by NEUROPUBLIC require a huge amount of work, which is translated into millions lines of code, numerous hours of development and corrections and – as a result – a significant increase in the production cost, which directly affects the final cost of the product. Our company identified an opportunity in this need and, already having the necessary expertise through our collaboration with the European Space Agency, we decided to proceed with the radical technological renovation of our Development and Production Department of the company.
In this context, we developed a technology we call NeuroCode (or Code Generator), which is actually a software program which produces code for other software applications. Using NeuroCode, the new code produced comes out automatically, avoiding the time-consuming and error-prone process of manual programming method.
Which was the process through which the knowledge and the adaptation of this new technology came true?
NeuroCode’s technology was developed by the IT engineers’ team of NEUROPUBLIC’s Research & Development teamτης NEUROPUBLIC, in the context of our collaboration with the European Space Agency, based on the company’s expertise στο συγκεκριμένο αντικείμενο. After being successfully tested in various projects of ESA, the technology is now applied to various different cases which meet the needs of different bodies of both the public and private sector, allowing the quick standardization and development of applications.
How is the efficiency of the Code Generator tested and validated until now?
The NeuroCode / Code Generator has already produced millions of lines of code so far for the Cloud applications of the company, it has minimized the number of errors in the systems produced by the company and endows the NEUROPUBLIC products and services the stability and reliability that today are available only to the space technology software.
What are the benefits of an end user of an application developed using this technology?
On one hand, the adoption of common standards provides a unique identity to the applications and systems of the company while on the other hand these are extremely user-friendly thanks to the common approach is followed in all cases. This fact that allows users to quickly adapt to new systems and applications, leading to reduced support times needed for simple issues of low importance (such as the location of specific buttons, the setup of application menus etc.).
Which is the substantial benefit of the company from the Code Generator?
By using the Code Generator, NEUROPUBLIC has managed to improve the quality of its systems and applications, reducing at the same time the development time by approximately 75%. This allows for reduced production cost and the development of systems with high adaptation and expansion capabilities, user –friendly and easily adopted by users, thus satisfying even its most demanding customers.
As regards the company itself, the use of the Code Generator internally encourages team work, allows the constant training of the existing staff in new technologies and at the same time the search for talents with special skills and knowledge, who will be able to easily join its team.
Significant productivity growth
Which are the main advantages of using the Code Generator over the traditional manual coding?
The advantages of using the Code Generator for the development of applications can be shown in practice through a series of metrics and measurements based on real data coming from the Production Department of NEUROPUBLIC. Using the Code Generator in specific systems, higher productivity rates of the Production Department were observed, as the code produced through by the Code Generator reaches the 94% of the total code, leaving only 6% to be developed manually.
In practice, the time required for the development of an application by manually coding was 16 weeks while the use of the Code Generator reduced this period to just 4 weeks – in this sense, the development was completed 4 times faster and most importantly, the time needed for the error-checking and testing the application was reduced from 8 weeks to just 2 (a reduction of up to 75%).
Using the Code Generator for the development of applications also leads to lower cost for customers, and fewer errors in the applications developed by the company; something that provides a competitive advantage over the existing competition (which follows the traditional programming approach).
On the other hand, minimizing errors in the code through the use of the Code Generator is also an important factor of differentiation from the typical software development approach. Software development through the Code Generator requires less manual coding and therefore results in less errors in the code – because errors are mostly made by humans. However, if an error makes it into the developed code, then the correction takes place centrally and as a result the same error is fixed in all affected applications. Last but not least, the produced code is highly optimized, which has a high positive impact on the execution speed.
In a system developed through the Code Generator, the adoption of new technologies becomes easier through the Neurolang language, which is also developed by NEUROPUBLIC. Neurolang allows the adaptation of the application in different technologies through a simple and short process (i.e. referring to adaptation to JSF/Java, Angular/Java, iOS/Android etc.).
An additional advantage of the applications developed by NEUROPUBLIC using the Code Generator is that despite their apparent differences they still share the same architectural structure. This allows each member of the production team to easily support and maintain all applications developed by the company, without issues and omitting the need for specific knowledge of various technologies.
