GitHub brings DevOps to life at Procter & Gamble.

Procter & Gamble is home to some of the more recognizable brands in the world, including Bounty, Crest, Dawn, Gillette, and Tide. You’ll find them on the shelves everywhere from mom-and-pop run corner stores to big chains like Walmart and CVS. Chances are you have a few of their products in your home right now.

From manufacturing to logistics to human resources management, software plays a key role in running any business of P&G’s size and scale. Ever-changing supply chains and the era of e-commerce and same-day product delivery have made agility a priority for Procter & Gamble.

“Some parts of the business need to be deploying software changes multiple times a day to stay current,” Agile & DevOps lead Danilo Suntal says.

In 2020, P&G embarked on an ambitious project to update the company’s DevOps and CI/CD tooling and processes, putting GitHub at the heart of their development efforts. A few teams were already using GitHub, but they weren’t centrally managed within the company. Suntal’s team saw an opportunity to manage a set of development tools used throughout P&G to take the burden of managing things away from developers so they can focus more on their own team-specific systems.

GitHub provides a way to tie these different systems together. Procter & Gamble’s IT teams use a wide variety of tools, including Jira, Service Now, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins, all which are connected to GitHub. “The availability of out-of-the-box integrations with our existing tooling is a big part of GitHub’s appeal,” Suntal says. “GitHub really helps bring DevOps to life.”

The availability of out-of-the-box integrations with our existing tooling is a big part of GitHub’s appeal. GitHub really helps bring DevOps to life.

Suntal sees GitHub as an investment in P&G’s future. “We stay close to what’s best in the industry. We are continuously exploring new tools and trends,” Suntal says. “But on the other hand, we have a high cost of migration. So we can’t just jump ship every other month and look into the latest fancy tool. We selected GitHub because it provided the best of both worlds—a trusted platform, and fast-paced product innovation.”

Strategic focus on GitHub as the central place for development has helped P&G’s developers collaborate. “It gets everyone on the same page, speaking the same language,” Suntal says.

P&G developers are still incrementally adopting GitHub’s advanced capabilities. For example, some teams use GitHub Actions for build automation, cloud deployments and Infrastructure as Code. Suntal says it helps newer, less experienced developers automate tasks more easily. Others, meanwhile, are using GitHub Pages for internal documentation. In combination with GitHub Actions release documentation is created automatically.

P&G has enabled Dependabot by default across all repos for automatically updating dependency mapping. “Whenever somebody creates a new repo, Dependabot is configured automatically to them,” Agile and DevOps Solution Business Architect Eduardo Rodrigues Semensati says. “It fits in well with our CI/CD process because Dependabot follows the same rules our developers follow.”

P&G works with hundreds of external developers and all the code they commit to P&G’s repos is scanned not just for vulnerabilities but for compliance-related issues as well. “It’s valuable to have the traceability,” Suntal says. “We need to know the providence of all the intellectual property committed to our code bases. The only way we can do that is to have all the code in our own internal source code management system, not on some vendor’s desktop.”

P&G also uses branch protection extensively. “We have a job that automatically sets up branch protection on every new repo’s default branch to drive best practices and so that developers don’t have to worry about setting it up,” Semensati says.

From collaboration to security to automation, GitHub helps P&G developers solve problems and, in some cases, avoid time-consuming problems altogether. Ultimately, that means less time configuring and managing tooling and more time creating new things. “GitHub is an accelerator,” Suntal says. “It reduces the amount of time it takes for us to bring value to our customers and consumers.”