Supporting your team's collaboration with Git

Git is increasingly being used by dev teams on all kinds of software projects and products, both large and small scale. Of particular interest is Git's ability to support collaboration and integrate into the wider application lifecycle workflow.

Atlassian's Git offerings (Stash for server installation, Bitbucket for those in the cloud) integrate with other Atlassian tools Bamboo, Jira and Jira agile to that support the whole application lifecycle.

Work together any time, any place, any language

Increasingly teams are working across time zones and also across languages. While each developer needs to be able to choose their own tools, it's crucial that teams can have defined workflows for key tasks feature branching, a forked workflow or anything in between. Supporting multiple languages in the interface also represents a key benefit for most modern dev teams.

Choosing a solution that is integrated with Jira means that subject matter expects or other members of the team can be looped-in, find out the context of the issue and work off a forked repo to keep the master secure.

Communication for collaborative

Collaboration is all about communication. Commenting and code review are fundamental to Git. With the right tools in your workflow, the process of peer review ensures effective collaboration on the codebase. Having tools in place to make branch comparison easier change and commit summaries, side-by-side comparison, hunk map navigation helps to accelerate the adoption process.

Getting started with Git

Atlassian have just launched Git Essentials, an integrated bundle of tools to kick-start your team's use of Git. Git Essentials adds a DVCS (distributed version control system) to your application lifecycle workflow. This makes Git much easier to use effectively by putting the tools in the right place at the right time for each user.

The advantage of adopting a integrated toolset such as Git Essentials is that the functionality you need is presented as part of your workflow. This means that switching between tools becomes seamless and intuitive particularly useful if you are new to Git. By putting Git right into the heart of your workflow, Git Essentials:

• Simplifies access to code and quality data
• Encourages best practice
• Simplifies Git adoption
• Improves traceability
• Facilitates Quality Assurance
• Aids tracking and management
• Makes application development more efficient

For more information about our approach to code management in the application lifecycle, collaboration with Git or the Git Essentials package, contact Adaptavist now.