Before any home improvement project begins in earnest, you need to plan for the  materials needed to complete the job. It can be error-prone and dangerous work for those of us not used to climbing ladders and stretching tape measures. With HOVER, anyone can build a detailed 3D model with just a few smartphone snaps. HOVER's models aren’t just incredibly accurate to help estimate the  project budget, but visualization of the finished product, so you can see what the new colors or siding might look like when you’re done.

The technology landscape changes fast and HOVER must stay ahead of the curve. Its developers need to focus on building great products and building value, not managing tools. To help them spend more time in a flow state, the company has worked to streamline its DevSecOps platform, bringing collaboration, AI, automation, security tooling, and more into a single platform with GitHub.

GitHub has long played a role in the company's success, but HOVER recently expanded its use of GitHub, moving its CI/CD pipelines to GitHub Actions, embracing GitHub Advanced Security, and tapping into the power of GitHub Copilot for Business. Replacing third-party security and automation tools with GitHub saves HOVER money, but the bigger benefit is developer experience. 

“GitHub is seamlessly embedded into our workflow, which makes for a more seamless experience than working with several separate integrations,” Thomas Genin, Director of Engineering at HOVER, says.

GitHub is seamlessly embedded into our workflow, which makes for a more seamless experience than working with several separate integrations.

HOVER uses GitHub Actions to automate the development lifecycle, including unit tests, linting and code formatting, and many security functions. Much of the company's governance and process policies are automated with Actions as well, taking the burden of manual compliance off developers and managers and keeping development compliant with company policies by default. 

GitHub Copilot for Business has also been a huge help in keeping developers in the flow, by bringing helpful information to the place they write code, saving them from having to switch contexts to search for answers on StackOverflow or elsewhere. Genin explains no one at HOVER has unrealistic expectations of GitHub Copilot—they know they still have to write and review code. The place GitHub Copilot helps the most is not bug fixes, but "blank slate" development, when developers have lots of boilerplate code to create.

"Copilot can get you about 80% of the way there, then you just have to make the final tweaks to solve your specific problem," he says. "It's a great productivity boost." It can also help make writing tests, which developers tend not to want to do, much easier, thus improving the company's test coverage. 

Previously, security scanning and review was an additional step that happened outside a developer's workflow. Security issues were only remedied after code was merged, by which time developers had already moved on to other projects. “GitHub Advanced Security keeps developers from adding vulnerabilities into the code in the first place by detecting them earlier in the process," he says. "No one else provides this level of integration. It's a better experience for the developer and makes our code more secure." For example, GitHub’s secret scanning automatically stops developers from pushing passwords, keys, or other secrets to a repository, ensuring they never come anywhere near a production codebase.

GitHub Advanced Security keeps developers from adding vulnerabilities into the code in the first place by detecting them earlier in the process. No one else provides this level of integration. It's a better experience for the developer and makes our code more secure.

Plus, GitHub Advanced Security provides more actionable reports with fewer false negatives than other tools, says Genin. "It's very common for reports from other tools to lack the context we need to address security issues," he says. GitHub, on the other hand, provides detailed explanations of problems, stack traces to illustrate where they are introduced or exposed, and links to documentation and other information.

GitHub not only reduces onboarding time because so many developers are already familiar with it, but also because consolidating tools means there are far fewer tools and services that people need to request access to. "GitHub is in a unique position to provide this integrated experience," he says. "With first-party tools like GitHub Actions and GitHub Advanced Security, we save our developers from managing multiple accounts and context switching when they’re trying to focus on building code." GitHub provides a comprehensive place for not only automation and security, but for other activities as well, such as installing dependencies from GitHub Packages and surfacing code snippets with GitHub Advanced search.

"GitHub just keeps getting better," Genin says about the new features and improvements GitHub continues to make to its platform. "GitHub has a strong focus on listening to developers and addressing their needs."