Leap Motion builds technology that lets people interact with digital content in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). With a team of 70 headquartered in San Francisco, Leap Motion sees its mission as removing the barriers between people and technology.

To deliver on that mission, and solve some of the most interesting problems in VR and AR, Leap Motion relies on an engineering team with a highly-versatile set of skills and technologies that are designed to keep everyone on the same page.

Code and collaboration, not chaos

In its early days, Leap Motion was using a series of disparate tools like JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, and Radmine to try and keep engineers, product managers, and designers close to the code. Wanting a more unified solution, the team decided to implement GitHub Enterprise. We wanted an issue tracker that would allow us to talk about features in a technical way and give non-technical people visibility without overhead, said Peter Ehrlich, product engineer at Leap Motion. GitHub Enterprise keeps everyone on the same page and reduces chaos.

Real-time communication with GitHub integrations

As the team transitioned to GitHub Enterprise, they used the GitHub Importer to easily move code from other version control platforms. Now, GitHub sits at the center of Leap Motion’s software development environment. Art Wiesen, program manager at Leap Motion, explained, The GitHub user interface, Pull Request model, and issue tracker make it a tool that centralizes the conversation around the code alongside the code itself.

Art continued, GitHub has spawned critical conversations that have strengthened our pull request policy, and by extension, our code. GitHub is a rock for us.

GitHub is a rock for us.

The Leap Motion team has relied heavily on GitHub integrations to extend and customize its workflow. The team uses ZenHub, Slack, Jenkins, and Travis CI among others. Peter explains, The Slack integration lets us know what’s happening in real-time and allows the team to see into other people’s work. Art added, Slack’s real-time notifications supplement GitHub emails nicely.

Leap Motion has also integrated ZenHub, a tool that provides native product management support for GitHub Issues. Art said, Those who aren’t part of the engineering team can easily use GitHub as an issue tracker with the adoption of ZenHub. This helps keep a significant portion of your company communicating and tracking in one central spot. This makes for better collaboration and more effective work.

For issue tracking we originally used JIRA; however, that resulted in fractured conversation around engineering’s work across 2 systems. We migrated everything to ZenHub to keep our issue tracking and conversation around our work all alongside our code in ZenHub.

Art concluded, GitHub Enterprise has changed how we work and acts as the central source of truth. The UX flow and the ability to have peer reviews on pull requests promotes communication which has strengthened our codebase and code practices.