Global Fortune 100 Case Study: Increasing Code Quality and Developer Velocity with Qodo Merge

About the Customer

A Global Fortune 100 retailer operates one of the world’s largest and most complex technology organizations, supporting tens of thousands of engineers worldwide. The company’s Global Developer Productivity team is responsible for ensuring that distributed development teams deliver secure, scalable, and high-quality applications at speed while navigating strict enterprise security and compliance requirements.

Customer Challenge

In 2024, the retailer’s Global Developer Productivity team focused heavily on piloting and deploying new generative AI tools to improve engineering efficiency. Despite these efforts, several critical challenges persisted:

• Low-quality pull request (PR) descriptions and documentation often resulted in shallow or incomplete code reviews, ultimately leading to lower software quality.
• Code reviews across regions slowed developer velocity, as distributed teams struggled with consistency and communication.
• Scale and complexity of the environment – they needed a solution to support more than 20,000 developers globally, deployed into an air-gapped, security-restricted environment, without disrupting existing workflows.

If unaddressed, these challenges risked delays in delivery, reduced code quality, increased security vulnerabilities, and developer frustration, all at a scale that could impact global technology operations.

AI-powered Code Review with Qodo

The retailer partnered with Qodo to deploy Qodo Merge, its AI-powered code review solution, as the standard across all repositories.

The solution delivered several key capabilities directly in the development teams’ workflows:

• AI-generated PR descriptions and level-of-effort (LOE) estimates, ensuring that every pull request started with rich, contextual documentation.
• Automated improvement suggestions, helping developers produce cleaner, more maintainable code.
• Bug and security issue detection, embedding security best practices earlier in the development lifecycle.
• An AI assistant for code understanding, improving reviewer efficiency by helping developers navigate unfamiliar codebases.

Deployment was designed to meet the retailer’s unique enterprise constraints:

• Successfully deployed into an air-gapped, highly secure environment.
• Rolled out globally across all development teams and repositories.
• Tailored to support 26,000+ developers, ensuring consistent adoption and performance.

Qodo provided both pre-implementation support — including custom fitting the solution to strict security requirements — and ongoing post-deployment services, ensuring smooth adoption, monitoring usage, and measuring outcomes.

Results and Benefits

The deployment of Qodo Merge generated measurable and significant outcomes:

• Time savings: The pilot demonstrated that developers saved ~50 hours per month per user. Over the course of 2024, this translated into more than 450,000 developer hours saved.
  
• Adoption: Within six months, the retailer recorded over 12,000 monthly active users (MAUs), demonstrating rapid uptake and sustained value across its global engineering teams.
  
• Improved velocity and quality: Code reviews were faster, more consistent, and higher in quality, allowing developers to maintain velocity without compromising on security or maintainability.

This transformation allowed the retailer to balance developer velocity with code quality, enabling its global engineering workforce to operate more efficiently in an increasingly AI-driven development landscape.