Github Collaboration Tips

Thursday, March 10, 2016
Secret War Journal[10 March 2016]

I have worked with a few projects on Github and I find myself repeating a few things that are consistent across projects to people who are new to Git. Conflicts tend to occur more frequently when certain procedures are not observed. It is not exactly their fault as those actions are not compulsory but I feel that they are good practices that can help to reduce the number of conflicts that may occur in the repository when merging or committing.

Thus, when my school releases the below for SVN, I felt this is a good chance to share this so that more people will be able to exercise these good practices to reduce the number of conflicts that may occur when collaborating with each other in a SVN/Git environment. Hope this helps!

Some tips for team collaboration using SVN (applicable for Git in my opinion):

  • Commit frequently. Do not wait until you make too many changes which will increase the risk of conflicts.
  • Update your working copy before modifying it.
  • Avoid touching the same file (or the same portion of a file) at the same time by a few team members. This helps to reduce the risk of conflicts.
  • Let the team member who makes the most changes to a file commit his changes first. Then others try to merge their changes into repository.
Of course, we still need to know how handle conflicts as conflicts within the repository sometimes may be inevitable. Despite that, an reduction in conflicts really help to speed up development! :)
Related Posts with Thumbnails