This partner insight was authored in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
To keep pace with today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face the challenge of modernizing their SAP environments while maintaining business continuity.
Whether you are operating SAP in on-premises data centers, AWS Cloud, or managing hybrid environments with both ECC and S/4HANA systems, Amazon Q Developer accelerates your SAP transformation journey by reducing manual effort, minimizing risks, and accelerating your SAP modernization initiatives—all while leveraging the scale, security, and innovation capabilities of AWS.
Amazon Q Developer revolutionizes SAP development by serving as an intelligent coding companion that understands ABAP intricacies, SAP business processes, and development requirements. The tool addresses a critical challenge faced by SAP customers: the maintenance of legacy ABAP code that often lacks proper documentation and in many cases was created by developers who are no longer accessible. This documentation gap traditionally poses significant obstacles during system customization or S/4HANA upgrades. However, Amazon Q Developer bridges this divide by functioning as an intelligent assistant that comprehends both technical ABAP aspects and underlying business processes.
As organizations move to modern cloud architectures, this tool streamlines the transformation of legacy SAP systems. Through its intuitive natural language interface, developers can efficiently analyze legacy code, implement new features, and accelerate development tasks, turning previously complex challenges into streamlined processes. Additional capabilities include:
- Creating technical documentation for existing ABAP code
- Test classes creation
- Explaining the business processes within ABAP code
- Identifying dependencies and connections between different code components
- Support for MCP server to enrich the content and overall capability
Amazon Q Developer seamlessly integrates across the full spectrum of SAP development frameworks, supporting traditional ABAP, modern ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP), and cloud-native SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP). Amazon Q Developer is generally available to all customers through Visual Studio Code, SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) and Eclipse IDEs.
Customers using Amazon Q Developer with other programming languages (Java, Python) have reported up to 40% increase in developer productivity and up to 80% acceleration in various development tasks. We are already starting to hear from SAP customers and partners who are realizing similar benefits for ABAP development.
“Amazon Q Developer will be a game-changer for our ABAP development and application support teams,” Saul Dave, Senior Director of Enterprise Systems at Zappos.com, recently told our team.
Real-World Impact: Generating ABAP Code
Let's see Amazon Q Developer in action, with a practical example of generating an ABAP report:
“Generate an ABAP report named zhprp_sales_order_overview, showing list of open sales orders, filter either by order number or customer number (sold-to-party). Include: Sales order number, Sold-to-party, Order Creation date, Line Item number, Material Number, Ordered quantity, Confirmed Quantity. Order the records by sales order number. Display the output in ALV format.”
The following short video shows the input of the prompt and the output with the generated code. The Amazon Q Developer chat window is on the right side of the screen. The video also shows the code successfully running within SAP.
But Amazon Q Developer's capabilities extend far beyond simple code generation. It serves as:
1. A Learning Platform
For junior developers, it's an invaluable learning tool. When Amazon Q Developer generates code, it doesn't just provide solutions – it explains the reasoning behind them. It's like having a teacher who patiently explains SAP best practices and modern development patterns.
2. A Documentation Assistant
Documentation, often the tech professional’s least favorite part of development, becomes easier with Amazon Q Developer. It can generate comprehensive comments, explain complex logic, and even create user guides based on your code.
3. A Quality Guardian
Amazon Q Developer acts as an additional code reviewer, catching potential issues before they reach production. It suggests performance improvements, identifies security vulnerabilities, and ensures adherence to SAP's best practices.
4. A Complement to the Human-in-the-Loop
Despite its powerful capabilities, Amazon Q Developer doesn't replace human developers – it enhances them. In our projects, we've found that the best results come from combining Amazon Q Developer's suggestions with human expertise. Developers still need to:
- Review and validate generated code
- Review generated unit test cases
- Ensure business requirements are met
- Maintain security standards
Amazon Q Developer represents a significant leap forward in SAP development. It's not just about writing code faster – it's about writing better code, learning continuously, and delivering higher quality applications. As someone who has witnessed its impact firsthand, I can say that it's transforming how we approach SAP development.
The tool democratizes SAP development expertise, making best practices and modern patterns accessible to developers at all levels. It reduces the learning curve for new developers while helping experienced developers stay productive and innovative.
As we continue our journey with Amazon Q Developer, one thing is clear – the future of SAP development is here, and it's more exciting than ever. Whether you're maintaining legacy systems or building modern cloud applications, Amazon Q Developer is your partner in creating better, more efficient SAP solutions.
Remember, the best way to understand Amazon Q Developer's potential is to experience it yourself. Start small, stay curious, and let the tool surprise you with its capabilities. The future of SAP development is not just about writing code – it's about writing smarter code, and Amazon Q Developer is leading the way.
Pricing Models
You can get started on the Amazon Q Developer Free Tier, which offers 50 chat interactions per month, software development assistance 5 times per month, and transformation of up to 1,000 lines of code per month. The Pro Tier offers all features in the free tier, plus enterprise access control features to manage users and policies, ability to customize Amazon Q Developer to your code base to improve suggestions, and higher usage limits for advanced features. Click here to explore our detailed pricing plans.
Modernize your legacy SAP code today. Access this online workshop
for step-by-step instructions on setting up Amazon Q Developer. Watch for upcoming YouTube videos that demonstrate SAP use cases and provide deep dives into these and other scenarios. To learn more about Amazon Q Developer, view our documentation
or reach out to our teams to discuss how we can help modernize your legacy SAP code.
Special thanks to Isaac Feldberg, Tina Prause, Erik Kamman, Beth Sharp, and Bhuvan Wadhwa for their support in the publication of this blog.