Collaborating with Git and GitHub

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How does collaborative working differ from individual working?

• What are the challenges of working collaboratively with Git?

Objectives

• Explain some challenges and benefits of collaborative working

Working in a Team

Collaborating effectively as part of team brings additional challenges and opportunities compared to solo development.

Each of these examples will be shown again in a subsequent section.

Differing Goals and Objectives

Developer 1 - “I need a new type of analysis to finish my thesis”

Developer 2 - “My problem is bigger. I need better performance to process all my data”

Even when working independently you might find you need to need to work on different things at different times. This is greatly compounded however when you have multiple developers all wanting to contribute to the same Git repository.

We will see how Git allows you to have multiple simultaneous streams of work via branching and merging. You can use branches to organise your individual work and as a way to ensure your Git history doesn’t clash with other contributors. The ability to merge branches even supports working on the same part of the code as somebody else so you can work on whatever you want and worry about sorting out conflicts later.

Access and Permissions

Developer 1 - “Just email me your changes. I’ll save them into the master copy.”

Developer 2 - “Ok… so why do all of my changes have to go through you?”

An important practical consideration is where to store the code that you’re collaborating on. Usually you want everyone’s contributions to end up in one place and that place only being accessible by a particular individual is unsustainable. On the other hand you do need to be able to control how contributions are made.

Hosting your code on GitHub allows configuration of user access and granular permissions. This allows shared responsibility and the clear definition of roles within a project.

Need to Coordinate Efforts

Developer 1 - “I’m still waiting on those changes to the data analysis workflow.”

Developer 2 - “Huh? I added those a month ago.”

Successfully coordinating the efforts of multiple contributors is a key challenge to avoid delay and duplication of work. GitHub can help here via Issues that track planned, on-going and completed work and who is doing it.

Different Points of View

Developer 1 - “Here’s what I’ve been working on for the last month.”

Developer 2 - “Hmmm… if we tweak things here then it might be faster.”

Two heads, as they say, are better than one and writing software is no exception. There is no greater benefit to collaboration than being able to pick someone else’s brain about a problem. In software development this is usually called peer review and it’s considered good practice for all code to be independently looked over.

GitHub provides functionality for peer review via Pull Requests.

Individual styles and preferences

Developer 1 - “Tabs!”

Developer 2 - “Spaces!”

Developer 1 - “TABS!”

Developer 2 - “SPACES!”

Whilst it may seem trivial the tabs vs. spaces controversy is a long standing debate. A quick google search will reveal any number of discussions on the topic. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, but trouble can arise when everyone follows their own preference and you end up with a messy combination. The same logic applies in many places - consistency is king!

To get around these sorts of issues it’s a good idea to make a choice and then automatically enforce it. GitHub Actions is a Continuous Integration system that can be used to automate many kinds of checks to ensure a consistent set of preferences or standards for all code.

Summary

Coding as a team presents a number of challenges and opportunities. Both Git and GitHub were specifically designed to help you mitigate those challenges and embrace those opportunities. In the rest of this course we’ll be looking in detail at the range of functionality that is touched on above.

Key Points

• Collaborative working poses additional challenges compared to individual working

• Git and GitHub provide powerful tools to help teams to work together