Category: Git

GitHub is an excellent platform for software developers as it allows teams to work on projects of all sizes but to divide the work into easy, manageable tasks, each of which needs to be vetted before being pushed live.  As a team member and a project manager, it’s always essential to know the status of…

What would happen to your project if one of your developers got hit by a bus tomorrow? What if it was more than one? Or two? Or Three? In other words, what’s your “bus factor.” A “bus factor” (or “key person risk”) is a thought experiment designed to help teams factor in missing critical components…

As a manager, do you regularly run sprint retrospectives? If you’re skipping this final part of the sprint process, you may be missing out on ways to improve how your team approaches pull requests, code reviews, and more. Doing regular retrospectives is a common practice for some high-functioning teams. It gives them perspective on the…

Does your team typically have pull requests in the queue that are more than a week old? Is it common for pull requests to sit in the review process for more than a day? You might be dealing with long-running pull requests, and that could be a sign of uncertainty or even disagreements in what…

The refactoring of Git branches can provide many benefits, including: Refactoring happens from time to time. It allows developers to: With so much upside to refactoring, it’s hard to believe that there are reasons it shouldn’t be done. And yet, there are. The danger of (too much) refactoring is that it can end up acting…

Do you have engineers that open pull requests and then go ahead and approve it themselves? That’s a huge red flag! With no one reviewing the work, and the pull request being sent to production, your team is setting itself up for trouble. As a rule, most companies do not let developers merge their own…

While knowledge silos may exist between departments, they become an issue when they begin to crop up amongst team members. Having knowledge silos on your team means information is not passing freely among team members, which could be a sign of trouble. As a manager, you can identify knowledge silos pretty quickly by looking at…

Occasionally, teams or team members may submit work but then jump in to adjust and make changes right before the actual deadline. One or more contributors will fall into the habit of adding just one more thing…then another…then another. However, when the whole team falls into the habit of swapping in last-minute additions, it may…