GitHub offers great source control with many handy features
December 13, 2017

GitHub offers great source control with many handy features

Kevin Van Heusen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GitHub

GitHub is providing source control for our engineering department. We use it to manage source code for multiple releases, and our QA team uses it as well to ensure their work does not get lost. It also provides functionality for code reviews so we can ensure that our colleagues are following our coding standards.
  • GitHub has great code review features. You can approve or deny someone's pull request and add comments.
  • GitHub makes it easy to do a diff between changes requested in a Pull Request.
  • GitHub makes it easy to create multiple branches if need be and facilitates managing those branches.
  • The pull request interface sometimes generates an error message and requires you to use a different page to make a pull request.
  • Ignoring white space differences should be a UI option, instead, you have to know about an undocumented query string parameter (?w=1).
  • Would be nice to have a view for differences between branches, not just pull requests.
  • Code quality has improved due to the review PR features.
  • Overall engineers are productive in that it is easy to check in code on a regular basis.
  • Communication has improved because of Github's integrations with 3rd party build systems (know when a build fails due to a PR/etc).
GitHub has better branching features than Subversion. The code review process in GitHub alone makes it worthwhile, whereas we could have branches in Subversion, it was missing the ability to comment and review other people's code before checkin. GitHub has more control around accepting what code can be submitted into your repository.
GitHub is well suited for a team of engineers, it makes it easy for team members to collaborate. For a very small team/single user, it may have more features than needed, but in general it should meet the needs of any team out there. It has the ability to create private repositories so others can't see your code.