HP is a multinational corporation that has played a central role in the technology industry – in fact, its headquarters in Palo Alto, United States, is often referred to as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Best known for its range of printing technologies and pioneering work in the manufacture of personal computers and laptops, HP is committed to producing products designed to improve people’s lives.
The company is also making strides in software development, including management platforms and applications in its developer toolchain to support the needs of modern consumers. “We have fantastic devices and services for everyday, commercial, enterprise and industrial use—a comprehensive and integrated menu of hardware and software solutions,” said Evan Scheessele, senior manager of Enterprise Digital Services at HP. “We are currently focused on evolving our tools and practices to have an integrated enterprise in the way we develop software and services. Together, we are creating powerful experiences and solutions, expanding our leading hardware portfolio and creating value for our customers and partners.”
To modernize and standardize its software development process, HP needed to find a way to increase developer efficiency and productivity, giving them more time for creativity and innovation. This also meant empowering the company’s many thousands of developers to be even more connected and collaborative.
“We know that to remain agile and competitive as a modern, global technology company, we need to build deeper digital experiences across hardware, software and services that can meet ever-changing customer demands. To do this, we have had to focus on supporting our developer community,” said Evan Scheessele.
Credit: Microsoft website
Supporting developers with AI
With a long-standing relationship with Microsoft, HP wanted to leverage the company’s expertise in generative AI. “To stay competitive, we knew we had to embrace AI, and from a developer’s perspective, we wanted to make that easier by giving our developers the tools and resources they need to create and collaborate efficiently, unlocking new value and speed. GitHub Copilot was the answer,” he said.
HP tested the GitHub Copilot for Business and after positive results and enthusiastic feedback from an initial group of developers, the company decided to lean even more into GitHub Copilot together with the GitHub Enterprise, giving HP access to AI-assisted capabilities optimized for developers. This includes the ability to receive code suggestions based on initial source code and a chat interface that helps developers get answers to coding-related questions in supported integrated development environments (IDEs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs).
After incorporating GitHub Copilot into their workflows, HP developers found they could write and review code faster, receiving suggestions for improved code along the way. They used Copilot in conjunction with other familiar elements of an enterprise software toolchain—such as GitHub Enterprise, Azure DevOps, and Visual Studio—to create a powerful ecosystem for more efficient software development. Using GitHub Copilot, they could easily assess and update old code and resolve issues more quickly for new projects. Additionally, HP developer teams found that using GitHub technologies helped them achieve a higher level of governance of corporate development practices and engagement with the broader developer community.
“With GitHub Copilot, our developers can focus on building new solutions and solving bigger challenges, without getting bogged down in the minutiae of tedious code structures and programming language syntax,” said Evan Scheessele. “This means our great developers are more focused on their project’s features and customer experience goals, building better software, bringing more value to market faster, and together, the community as a whole understands our codebase better across the company than we’ve ever seen before.”
Increased productivity and collaboration
Evan Scheessele says HP now has several thousand developers actively using GitHub Copilot every day, and their productivity has increased significantly. Perhaps just as important, the senior manager says, is that adopting GitHub Copilot and coordinating its integration into developer workflows has helped HP leaders better connect and coordinate previously disparate dev teams, resulting in more information sharing and collaboration across different areas of the company.
“GitHub Copilot has opened up an exciting new opportunity for collaboration, a transformational journey that is engaging the community as a whole—not as siloed scrum teams or distributed pockets of individual developers,” says Evan Scheessele. “It’s been an opportunity to talk about the changing landscape of technology, the AI landscape, and what we want to create with it now that we have these new superpowers to bring high-quality, high-level solutions to market.”
Even with new superpowers, HP teams are eager to learn and do more with AI. “It’s exciting because we’re evolving our expectations while GitHub is enhancing Copilot capabilities and AI-powered features,” he said. “A lot of the feedback from our teams shows that we’re already building a successful story by bringing generative AI directly into the practice of writing code. This gives us confidence in our ability to respond to future opportunities at speed, which will help us create and deliver even more value for our customers.”
