Wondering what all the hype around GitHub is all about? GitHub is primarily a tool for developers to safely and quickly make changes to code. But if you work for a company that creates software products, it has a lot of benefits for your non-development teams as well. In the post below, we’ll cover the basics of Git (the software system behind GitHub), GitHub, and how they can help you work more efficiently.
What Is GitHub?
Before you can fully appreciate what GitHub is and how your business can use it, you’ll first need to understand Git.
Why Should My Team Use Git?
Let’s go over a few different ways your team can benefit from using Git.
Git for Developers
Git has a few key benefits for your development team:
- Branch Workflow
- Distributed Development
- Large Community
- Faster Release Cycle
Git for Marketing
But the benefits of Git don’t end with your development team, they can help with your marketing too.
Git for Designers
Gits branch workflow and local repository make it easy for your design team to rapidly prototype new UI/UX elements.
Git for Customer Support
Your customer support team might be great at responding quickly to user problems and questions by explaining how your product works or directing them to relevant resources.
What Is GitHub?
- Easily share your website or application when it’s in the development stages ; whether you’re looking for feedback from stakeholders or want to get an expert opinion on your code, just send a link and anyone can easily review and test things in progress, rather than looking at flat mockups or reading through unwieldy documents.
- Browse and follow popular development projects to check out other developer’s work, build relationships with the broader software community, and even implement new features and strategies using other’s code (ONLY with their permission, of course).
- Track changes, issues, and milestones so you can know what collaborators are doing, ask them about bugs, and give them goals to work toward.
How Can Our Team Use GitHub?
GitHub has a host of powerful features that can help you better manage your development process and all the teams and people involved.
Seamless Code Review
GitHub’s built-in code review tools make changes happen faster and more safely by enabling your development team to quickly make changes but verify everything’s working before you update your main app or website.
Project Management
Since proper project management is key to an efficient and effective software development process, GitHub also includes a number of features to help you manage tasks and goals.
- Task boards that live right next to your code inside GitHub.
- Drag and drop cards to let you assign issues or pull requests to team members so it’s clear who’s working on what.
- Milestones to organize and track progress.
- Notes to capture ideas that might be useful but don’t belong to a particular issue or pull request.