Fennwick
Payments
140 engineers
Review wait down from 9 hours to 40 minutes.
A payments company cut the wait for a first review from most of a working day to less than a coffee break.
22%
More pull requests merged per week
3 days
From install to every repository
Before
Fennwick ships to 11 countries from four offices. A pull request opened in Lisbon after lunch was usually read in Toronto the next morning. Engineers kept three branches open at once to stay busy, and merge conflicts followed.
Rollout
The platform team installed Firstpass on two repositories on a Monday and on all 46 by Wednesday. Nothing in the pipeline changed. They turned blocking on for bugs and left everything else as a comment.
What changed
Authors now fix the obvious problems before a colleague opens the pull request, so the human review is shorter and happens sooner. The median wait fell to 40 minutes within a month, and the number of merged pull requests rose by 22%.
What they would tell you
Start with blocking off and read a week of comments first. Fennwick dismissed 9% of them, added four rules and has not touched the settings since.
Stack
TypeScript
Go
GitHub
Jest
go test
Uses
The first comment is there before I have switched tabs.
Jonas Feld
Staff Engineer
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