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Case Study: Improving developer velocity and efficiency through automation

Contra Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
Contra
Industry
Professional Networking Platform
Challenge
Long merge times at a high, rising PR volume
Headline result
Contra automated build, merge, and deploy to reach 39 deployments a day

Key results

39/day
Deployments
average
158/wk
Throughput
merges per week
23 hrs
Cycle time
average
5 hrs
Merge time
average

The challenge

Contra deploys to production with every pull request. At an average of 39 deployments per day and growing, engineers faced long merge times during peak hours. Manual review and merge steps risked things being missed, and regressions that passed on a branch but failed on main caused breakages.

The solution

Contra adopted Mergify's merge queue with Batch and Speculative Checks, allowing up to 15 pull requests to be merged safely in a single commit and deployment. A higher-priority queue handles hotfixes, and passing Renovate dependency updates are merged automatically.

Mergify allows us more time to focus on our core product and build a better experience for our users.

DS
Doug Schlenker
VP of Engineering, Contra

The results, in context

Contra reported an average cycle time of 23 hours, throughput of 158 merges per week, an average merge time of 5 hours, and 39 deployments per day on average. These figures are quoted from Mergify's published Contra story dated August 26, 2022.

Products used

Mergify Merge Queue