Collaborative working

Chris Beeley

Mar 23, 2023

Introduction

• This is definitely an art and not a science
• I do not claim to have all, or even most of, the answers
• How you use these tools is way more important than the tools themselves
• This is a culture and not a technique

Costs

• Delay and time
• Stress and disagreement
• Committee thinking
• Learning and effort

Benefits

• “From each according to their ability”
• Learning
• Reproducibility and reduced truck factor
• Fun!

GitHub as an organising principle behind work

• A project is just a set of milestones
• A milestone is just a set of issues
• An issue is just a set of commits
• A commit is just text added and removed

The repo owner

• Review milestones
• Review issues
  • Discuss the issue on the issue- NOT on email!
• Review pull requests and get your pull requests reviewed!

Asynchronous communication

• Involve others before you pull request
• Involve others when you pull request
• Read issues!
• Comment on issues!
• File issues- suggestions/ bug reports/ questions
  • NOT in emails

Asynchronous work

• Every piece of work has an issues associated with it
• Every piece of work associated with an issue lives on its own branch
• Every branch is incorporated to the main repo by a pull request
• Every pull request is reviewed

Iteration and documentation

• Analyse early, analyse often (using RAPs!)
• Write down what you did
• Write down what you did but then changed your mind about
• Favour Quarto/ RMarkdown
  • Clean sessions
  • Documentation and graphics

Data and .gitignore

• Your repo needs to be reproducible but also needs to be safe
• The main branch should be reproducible by anyone at any time
  • Document package dependencies (using renv)
  • Document data loads if the data isn’t in the repo