How Ford uses GitHub

Ford is building the modern car with innovative technologies and GitHub Enterprise.

Company Overview

Industry: Automotive
Developers: 22,000+
Location: Dearborn, MI

The Challenge

Ford teams were separated by their organizational structures and using legacy tools and processes that few outside the company were familiar with. Each group had developed its own solution over decades of software development. As Florian Frischmuth, Chief Engineer, Architecture and Software Platform, explained: "The status quo worked when there wasn't a need for groups to interact with each other. As we expanded the development of more complex features, we saw the need to work differently."

Finding the Right Solution

Ford formed a knowledgeable team to evaluate GitHub against other tools. Timothy Carmean, Software Processes and Tools Supervisor in the Central Software department, was researching ways to modernize how the team developed infotainment systems. The legacy stack included tools like Clearcase, but "nobody really knew how to use that outside of the company."

GitHub stood out for several reasons. Its strong following among new and experienced developers was key. "It's taught in school," said Carmean. "GitHub is the largest provider of open source repositories in the industry. And people graduating from college know how to use it—which was one of the most important reasons we brought it in."

The widespread knowledge of GitHub among Ford engineers sped up adoption and reduced onboarding time to just a few days. Ford's first instance of GitHub Enterprise began in a lab but gained traction quickly. Carmean's original goal was to support 100 developers, but the instance grew organically by word of mouth. The company now has 9,000 employees on the platform—and this number continues to increase.

Implementation and Scale

When Ford started using GitHub, it was developing critical intellectual property on a server underneath a professor's desk. Carmean held weekly meetings with the CIO to provide GitHub status updates until the enterprise instance launched in September 2016. Today, over 9,000 employees use it around the world, including teams in Germany, England, Turkey, India, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.

Carmean worked with the IT team to create a software development ecosystem supported by GitHub, Jira, Jenkins, Vagrant, Docker, and Nexus. "Our core philosophy is that no matter what software you're working on, these tools are useful. And GitHub is at the center, driving everything."

Evolving Workflows

As Ford's products became more complex, the company needed to evolve beyond traditional waterfall workflows. "We had to work in a coherent and collaborative fashion as the product we created grew much more complex," Frischmuth explained. "A car has hundreds of sensors. In order to create more features, you need to build on these sensors. You need to work together."

Carmean prefers the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for managing this complexity. "Cars rolling off the assembly line have to be safe. So we impose a greater level of discipline than many other industries." By organizing around release trains, teams ensure that software features properly integrate and meet thorough regulatory and safety requirements.

Innersourcing and Code Reuse

Innersourcing—building proprietary software using open source best practices—emerged as a natural fit at Ford. "When we started talking about code reuse, we felt like we already had the perfect platform in place: GitHub," said Carmean.

Tom Erickson, Supervisor of Global Software Tools and Processes at Ford, encourages his group to use innersource methods and scrums to work together across teams. "If you want to ship higher quality software faster, innersourcing just makes sense."

With Ford's code accessible to everyone in the organization, teams are no longer separated by their organizational structures. "Our environment allows developers to find solutions that have already been developed. They can collaborate on those, and then reuse them," said Frischmuth.

Expanding Use Cases

"We're using GitHub for everything," said Carmean, "including slide decks hosted among GitHub pages." Other internal teams have also adopted GitHub for diverse purposes. Engineering groups conduct statistical analysis and store scripts in repositories. IT support uses GitHub's markdown wikis to document how things work in the next-gen data center—allowing faster issue resolution than the older BMC ticket model.

Talent and Community

GitHub also helps Ford find new talent. Erickson said, "it's something I look for on resumes, and have our Human Resources Team look out for, too." Carmean added, "If you're doing anything open source, you're doing it on GitHub. To increase our talent pool, we dig into the open source projects and the tools developers use to build them."

Carmean understands the value of GitHub to both Ford and the larger open source community: "Make your repository public. Then let people use it, open pull requests, and have conversations about it. These features make the platform powerful."

Results

The entire GitHub organization at Ford is managed by just three people, freeing the team to focus on more pressing challenges. Developers now have the autonomy to follow through on new ideas, enhancements, and fixes without needing permission to create a repository or offer suggestions, removing bottlenecks across the organization.

As Carmean reflected, "Embracing open source has already reshaped how we think about the modern car."