Automated code refactoring company Moderne Inc. and artificial intelligence-powered unit test writing agent developer Diffblue Ltd. today announced a partnership to deliver an integrated solution for enterprise application modernization.

By joining forces, the two companies aim to help large organizations will be able to upgrade and modernize applications based on extremely large codebases with greater speed with less worry.  The collaboration combines Moderne’s code transformation capabilities with Diffblue’s autonomous agentic AI testing capabilities to catch potential bugs before they happen.

“One of the biggest impediments to successful application modernization initiatives is the absence of a solid testing foundation that catches regressions as code is upgraded,” said Moderne co-founder and Chief Executive Jonathan Schneider. “By integrating with Diffblue, we’re giving customers the ability to both refactor and test automatically — accelerating transformation while reducing risk.”

Moderne is built on the OpenRewrite open-source project, which provides automated, safe and scalable transformation across entire codebases. It’s deterministic, which means that it’s predictable for any task, including cloud migration, framework upgrades, security fixes and language updates. That’s important because the larger the codebase, the greater the chance that any update could introduce an issue — updating from an older version of Java, for example, version 8 to a more modern version such as 17.

Diffblue is the developer of an AI agent-driven service called Diffblue Cover that uses reinforcement learning to generate unit tests for Java applications, enhance code quality and improve code understandability. Unit tests are a fundamental part of the development lifecycle used to verify that individual parts of an application work as expected after changes.

Through the integration, Diffblue’s testing capabilities will be built directly into Moderne’s OpenRewrite recipes so they can run at large scale during application transformation. They will also be activated within Moderne’s multi-repository AI agent, Moddy, to provide test coverage for mass-scale changes.

Diffblue CEO Toffer Winslow said the partnership addresses what he saw as a critical need for companies to modernize code infrastructure, an expensive proposition that can take hours of developer time and energy. That’s time that workers could better spend on creating additional functionality or addressing business needs.

“Combining best-in-class auto-refactoring and agentic test generation creates a new standard of speed and cost-effectiveness that will change how enterprises approach upgrading and rearchitecting their legacy applications,” said Winslow.

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