Florian Berchtold
Software Engineer
Luminar Technology is an American technology company that develops vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies, primarily for self-driving cars. Their technology enables both detection and classification of objects out to 250 meters, from vehicles to lanes. Luminar Technology has four CI engineers in Germany, four in the US, and one hundred developers supported by the team — and growing.
Automate pull request merges
Reduce build times
Make developers more efficient
Remember before Mergify?
When Luminar started building its workflow a year ago, it didn't even have an auto-merge capability, and the team began with manual updates of pull requests.
The engineering team works in a so-called monorepo, and 70 developers contribute to it daily. They leveraged the branch protection system from GitHub, using simple rules such as needing at least two code approvers, forcing the pull request to be up to date with the main branch, etc.
This workflow was very limiting. The build time was between 1 and 1.5 hours. Developers were spending significant time trying to update their pull requests as soon as possible to get merged. They needed to be part of the first ones doing an update to have a chance to get their pull request merged.
The CI team started to look for solutions. Writing an automation tool would be possible, but it wasn't their core skill set. Finally, they found Mergify and a competitor by looking up ''GitHub Merge Queue''.
Mergify was the clear winner with its efficiency.
You get the benefits of Mergify immediately.
Florian Berchtold
Software Engineer
Changes Are Welcome
Mergify's impact on Luminar's workflow has been huge:
Luminar's engineering team now uses the merge queue to automate the pull request update process, preventing developers from clicking buttons manually;
Mergify worked from day one, so they immediately reaped the time-saving benefits from Mergify;
Over time, they increased their automation to save even more time and secure their merge flow.
Mergify increased developer efficiency, which is one of the main reasons they chose it. Using Velocity, a platform that analyses your work on GitHub and can show you development metrics, Luminar was able to compute their improvement in time to merge: they came down from one week time to merge to less than 24 hours.
There is no competitor doing stuff like this. Stop pressing buttons, there’s a bot that can do it!
Florian Berchtold
Software Engineer
Easy to Setup
The initial start was quick and easy. The Mergify documentation provided examples to help them understand the software's possibilities. Mergify works on the first day. You have the benefits immediately, and it took only two weeks for the team to set it up completely.
Luminar wouldn't be able to achieve these gains without automation and Mergify, which is now a significant foundation element.
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