Case Study: Intercom achieves 85% faster test times with Buildkite

Accelerating Intercom’s development harnessing Buildkite for rapid, reliable CI/CD

Intercom, a software company with 120 engineers, relies on a Ruby on Rails monolith and a large Ember.js frontend to power its live chat platform. As the team ships code around 150 times per day, it needed a CI system that could deliver greater reliability, control, and speed than the two tools it was using in parallel. Intercom turned to Buildkite to help solve these build and testing challenges.

Using Buildkite to orchestrate builds on Intercom’s own EC2 infrastructure, the team first focused on improving reliability before optimizing for speed. With Buildkite, Intercom cut test times from 20–25 minutes down to just three minutes, achieved an 85% reduction in test times, and gained the ability to run tens of thousands of tests with real-time feedback. Buildkite also helped Intercom improve developer productivity, speed up rollbacks and releases, and better handle security-related changes.

Intercom

Brian Scanlan

Principal Systems Engineer