Understand the way Luminar's developers save time and gain efficiency with Mergify.
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. They even understand what ''dark'' objects are at night, like a black car or a tire on the road that has minimal reflectivity. The company is based in Florida, where it was created in 2012. Luminar Technology has four CI engineers in Germany, four in the US, and one hundred developers supported by the team — and growing.
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 simples 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 a significant amount of 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.
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, avoiding developers from clicking buttons manually;
Mergify worked from day one, so they immediately reaped the time-saving benefits from Mergify;
Over the time, they increased their automation to save even more time and securing even more their merge flow.
Mergify increased the 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 down to less than 24 hours.
There is no competitor doing stuff like this.
The initial start was quick and easy using Mergify documentation, which showed examples to help them understand the possibilities of the software. 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 get these gains without automation and without Mergify. It's now a significant foundation element.
Stop pressing buttons, there’s a bot that can do it!
