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How Grupo Boticário uses GitHub

Grupo Boticário stays ahead of the curve with GitHub Copilot.

  • 94% of developers feel they are more productive with Copilot
  • 90% of developers report spending less effort on repetitive tasks
  • 2M+ lines of code accepted with GitHub Copilot in 2024

Company Overview

Location: Brazil
Developer Seats: 1,900

Since 1977, Grupo Boticário has specialized in making environmentally-friendly, cruelty-free beauty products ranging from fragrances to cosmetics to soaps. They're now the world's largest beauty retail franchise with over 4,000 points of sale in Brazil and around the world. Software is critical to everything they do, from manufacturing to logistics to reseller relations.

The Challenge

Part of Grupo Boticário's growth has been driven by strategic acquisitions of other companies, and with them their toolsets and development environments. The result was a fragmented developer toolchain with a variety of source code management and CI/CD tools that made it challenging for teams to work as quickly and efficiently. Many developers were using a mix of tools including TFS and Azure DevOps, which slowed the pace of development even as software became more important to the company.

The Solution

Grupo Boticário selected GitHub's platform to modernize and unify their development efforts. By standardizing on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, the company could streamline their tooling and gain access to cutting-edge features like GitHub Copilot and Actions. The move sent a message to the entire organization that Grupo Boticário was changing. Now all new projects begin on GitHub.

"GitHub just works," says Principal Software Engineer William Moraes. "We can focus on writing code and building great products, not on setting up and managing tools."

Accelerating Development with Copilot

Grupo Boticário immediately made Copilot available to every developer in the company to kickstart adoption. In an internal survey, 90% of developers said they spent less time and effort on repetitive tasks and 64% said Copilot freed them up to focus on more satisfying work. 94% said they considered themselves more productive overall thanks to Copilot. In 2024 alone, the total number of lines accepted exceeded the 2 million mark.

"Copilot is integral to our daily workflow," says Bruno Fuzetti Penso, head of Platform Engineering. "We rely on it extensively for a range of programming tasks, from writing code and documentation to testing and debugging."

Copilot helps developers autocomplete repetitive work so they can focus on more valuable aspects of development. For example, Copilot can help write TypeScript tasks, such as type declarations based on a JSON file, that need to be completed to use the language effectively. "Copilot not only generates this kind of boilerplate code, it also tailors it to our specific needs which improves the quality and security of our code," says Penso.

Beyond boilerplate, the team discovered that GitHub Copilot helps them become more creative and innovative. "It inspires us to think outside the box by offering multiple suggestions and examples," Penso explains. "It is like having a pair programming session."

Copilot Chat also helps Grupo Boticário work more effectively by answering questions from within the code editor, keeping developers in the flow and saving them from context switching to a search engine or knowledge base. Developers have found it particularly helpful in learning new programming languages. For example, it helps developers learn to apply Terraform's declarative programming paradigm more quickly by saving them from the need to reference documentation as frequently.

Consolidating Development Efforts

Grupo Boticário uses GitHub Actions and the GitHub REST API integrations to add processes and validations that improve code quality and security by bringing information into the heart of developer workflows. For example, the company uses GitHub Actions to pull logs from a variety of different tools—including SonarCloud, Fortify, Argo CD, and Dependabot—into a single pipeline on GitHub, saving developers from having to seek information in different locations. This way, teams can continue to use the tools they prefer while still working from a single platform.

The GitHub platform empowers sustainable growth for Grupo Boticário by surfacing repository data such as languages used, code owners, documentation, and software dependencies that can be used to make better decisions throughout the organization.

Fostering Collaboration

GitHub is helping foster more collaboration at Grupo Boticário. "Before we had limited visibility into each other's code," says Penso. "With GitHub, it's easier to collaborate and suggest improvements. Everything flows better."

Grupo Boticário's adoption of GitHub's platform has resulted in an overall productivity boost, from streamlining their tooling to facilitating collaboration to turbocharging development with Copilot. "In a word, GitHub gives us speed," says Penso. "We've been able to deploy to production faster than ever." With Copilot helping take the company's development efforts to new places, Grupo Boticário is poised to keep scaling its business worldwide and staying ahead of the curve.