How Zivid teams scale up by automating merges, being more efficient, and saving time.
Zivid designs and manufactures industrial 3D machine vision cameras and vision software for autonomous industrial robot cells, collaborative robot (cobot) cells, and other industrial automation systems. Their high-quality 3D vision and software enable customers to detect, pick, and place parts in bin-picking, piece picking, assembly, machine tending, and packing applications. The company was created in 2015 in Norway, and its software engineering team now counts twenty-five developers — and growing.
Zivid's engineering team uses a monorepo structure, and they were seeing scalability issues. Like many teams, they force their pull request to be up-to-date before allowing them to enter their base branch. The GitHub branch protection system provided this protection, but put the burden of keeping the pull request up to date on the shoulders of the engineer.
To keep their pull request up to date, engineers would have to rebase multiple times to get their pull request merged. They were clicking the Update Branch button all day. A loss of time and a great source of frustration for engineers.
Their motivation to look for a solution was to free some time to make sure developers were productive while improving their work conditions. It is really important to Zivid to build a team where people are happy.
After looking for a merge bot, an engineer in the team knew about Mergify and suggested it. They tested it and adopted it immediately. It was a no-brainer.
We haven't touched the configuration since we set it up. We are pretty happy with it!
Mergify enhanced the way Zivid engineering team works:
They did not have to adapt or change their process. They were able to keep their current workflow.
There is no period when they can't merge. When they do a code freeze, they do a new branch immediately. When their freeze is gone, they can release from that branch, using Mergify's backport feature.
They automated the work they were doing by tailoring Mergify to their needs.
They save a ton of CI time — and money. There is no unnecessary pull request rebase being done, and no "rebase fight" between developers. Mergify's merge queue takes care of all of that.
Mergify is a nice tool to make your work team more efficient. When you start to feel pain points, it's a no-brainer for teams.
At Zivid, work quality & happiness are values that the company does not want to miss. With an engineering team made of twenty-five people, it's essential to provide software that is easy to use and improve their daily tasks.
As Mergify is easy to deploy, they quickly integrated it into their work and now gave the responsibility to Mergify to do what they were manually doing before. Automating your merge processes allows saving engineers' hours and CI costs.
Everyone is really happy that we got Mergify! It's a great success. It's reliable and stable. It does not cost much engineering effort to set up and it removed so much frustration while saving so much CI cost!😁
