GNP's main operational system is mainframe-based with IBM components and has run for a little over twenty years.
“Our main operational system is a mainframe-based map with IBM components. System has been running for a little bit over twenty years.”
Person
Enrique Ibarra
1 episodes · 20 quoted claims
Ibarra expects COBOL expertise to become much harder to hire in the coming years.
“In a few years from now, uh, it's gonna be much harder to get COBOL resources.”
Ibarra says universities no longer teach COBOL and students show little interest in it.
“if you go to the universities, students don't learn COBOL in the universities. There's no real interest.”
GNP gave its developers coding co-pilots without formally measuring their productivity gains.
“we started to provide all of our developers with a co-pilots without formally measuring their increase in productivity.”
GNP has roughly one thousand developers.
“we have roughly about a thousand developers.”
GNP executives visited Blitzy's offices in Boston while evaluating the platform.
“we went and visited Blitzy in their, uh, at their offices in Boston to learn.”
The pilot system's back end was written in Java 8 and needed to move to Java 21.
“the back-end was written in an old version of Java, Java eight, and we needed to modernize that back-end to Java twenty one.”
Ibarra recalls the pilot system's front end using an old version of Angular, possibly version 11.
“Front end was developed in a very old version of angular, I think it was angular. Ele- eleven.”
The pilot's fourth use case was fixing security vulnerabilities in the existing system.
“a fourth use case where we wanted to do the remediation of a number of security vulnerabilities that the system had.”
The pilot connected Blitzy to GNP's GitLab code repository and CI/CD pipeline.
“connected to our Git lab repository, where all of our code re resides, and connecting it to our CICD pipeline”
GNP deploys its systems mainly on Google Cloud.
“we deploy our systems mainly in Google Cloud”
Ibarra reports the pilot accelerated engineering velocity by five to ten times.
“accelerated development velocity of between five and ten X in terms of engineering velocity”
For Java language upgrades, autonomous completion was close to 100 percent.
“the percentage of autonomous completion was close to 100%.”
Front-end modernization reached around 80 percent autonomous completion.
“modernization of front ends is different. Those. It's a little bit more tricky, but we got around 80%.”
GNP developers finish the remaining 20 percent of front-end work using their IDEs and co-pilots.
“for the remainder 20%, they do bike coding, bringing their IDEs, they're bringing their co-pilots, and they finish the remainder 20%.”
Ibarra says faster development lets GNP launch new insurance products in weeks instead of months.
“we can design, deploy, and iterate on like new insurance products in weeks rather than in months”
GNP added seven more teams to the Blitzy platform, with tutoring from Blitzy and GNP engineers.
“We have incorporated seven additional teams now that are gonna be trained and they're gonna be tutored.”
Ibarra expects GNP to change its software development paradigm within about two years.
“We think that in a two year time frame, we will be able to change the paradigm in in the company.”
Ibarra says GNP ideally will stop relying on external developers and keep only internal staff working with platforms.
“Ideally, we should not rely on external developers in the short to medium term, and we will only keep internal employees basically working with platforms.”
Ibarra says engineers must be trained to move from creators to editors and orchestrators of AI output.
“We have to train our engineers to transition from being creators to editors and orchestrators.”