Discover how Quorum, the market-leading public affairs platform, improved their development workflow by transitioning from GitHub Copilot to Augment Code. With faster response times and better context awareness, Quorum's engineering team achieved higher developer satisfaction across their modern tech stack.

The Challenge

Quorum's engineering team manages a complex codebase that supports public affairs professionals across multiple jurisdictions, including Congress, state legislatures, and international bodies. With approximately 70 active developers spread across the US, Brazil, and Moldova, maintaining consistent code quality and developer productivity was crucial.

As Chris McFadden, CTO at Quorum, explained, "Since many of our developers have been with us for less than three years and are working with a large and evolving codebase, our current focus is making it easier for developers to understand and extend the code while improving overall developer experience. We believe this is crucial for long-term productivity gains."

Why Augment?

After a year of using GitHub Copilot Business, Quorum sought a more sophisticated AI coding assistant. Several key factors led them to choose Augment:

• Superior Response Time: "The Speed and quality of responses have been impressive. It considers what you wrote a few moments ago across files to suggest appropriate code."
• Intelligent Auto-Complete: "If I write a new CSS class, it will suggest it for me on my React component, while Copilot suggests random class names. Augment tries to complete small parts, making the workflow more natural."
• Enhanced IDE Support: "Multiple IDEs are supported, whereas GitHub Copilot only natively supports/maintains an extension for Visual Studio Code because it's a Microsoft product."
• Advanced Analytics: "Github has no reporting other than the last used date for each person, whereas Augment is preparing to release advanced reporting to show clearly how the team uses the product and allows the team to optimize its use and adoption."
• Flexible Pricing Model: "Based on active developers rather than named seats, allows us to pay for what we use and minimize user provisioning overhead."

The Results

Quorum's transition to Augment has yielded several significant benefits:

• Rapid Value Recognition: The team saw clear value during their 30-day evaluation period, leading to a broader rollout.
• Enhanced Developer Workflow: Augment's ability to provide smaller, more accurate suggestions has improved the development process, particularly in maintaining consistency across their modern tech stack of Python, Django, React, and TypeScript.

Looking Ahead

Quorum sees AI coding assistants as an integral part of their development future. "I expect the adoption of AI for Code tools like Augment to accelerate and eventually become as integral to development as an IDE," McFadden shared. "These tools will increasingly handle routine coding tasks, improving code quality and enabling engineers to focus on more complex problem-solving."

While the team is still early in measuring quantitative productivity gains, they are tracking key metrics such as Change Lead Time for PRs and anticipate seeing improvements in PR volume, lead time, and code quality as their team becomes more familiar with Augment.

About Quorum

Quorum is public affairs software that helps users get information and execute strategy, all in one place. Thousands of public affairs professionals use Quorum for their work in Congress, all 50 state legislatures, major U.S. cities, the European Union, and several additional countries. Quorum works with corporations, trade associations, and nonprofits such as Toyota, Walmart, Uber, the Sierra Club, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Air Force. Founded in 2014, Quorum is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Industry: Public Affairs Software

Location: Washington, DC

Team Size: ~70 developers

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries: Python, Django, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL

IDE: Multiple IDEs supported