Harnessing the power of git: Convo. starter
A while back I worked for a company that mainly uses SVN to manage their source code and were just about to adopt git. I just had to help drive the adoption of a distributed vcs, so I sent out a series of emails on using git to improve productivity and code quality. Here is the first email of the series.
Hi all,
We have adopted git as the Version Control System(vcs) for the source code of our projects. But is there a way of using git to make us more productive and write better and higher quality codes? That what we’ll try to explore.
Our work as developers is to collaborate in building awesome applications. In doing that, we build and improve on each other’s progress to the code base. This is where vcs comes in, to keep track of every modification to the code. If there’s a mistake or bug, we can turn back the clock and compare/fix earlier versions of the code without much disruption to other team members.
Git as a distributed vcs makes development easier for agile teams. Rather than have only one single place for the full version history of the code as is in once-popular version control systems, Subversion (also known as SVN), in Git, every developer’s working copy of the code is also a repository that can contain the full history of all changes. This makes it possible for developers to focus more on writing code than dealing with changes (if done the right way).
Git can be of benefit to everybody from the development team to marketing team, product management. The biggest advantages of Git that we can exploit is its branching capabilities where branches are cheap and easy to merge. This facilitates the popular feature branch workflow which ensures that master always has the production (ready) code and any new feature is on a different (feature) branch. Feature branching combined with pull request (merge request) ensures that the code finally merged into master(production/Live) branch has been reviewed and is up to standard. Since pull request is a way to ask for your branch to be merged into the repository, it gives room for project leads and other developers to understand and discuss changes.
I hope this starts the conversation on effectively utilising the features of git to build an awesome team of awesome developers. Feel free to reply all to contribute to the discussion, until the next….
Reference: Atlassian git tutorial and others
