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