Digital Transformation Tips from the Experts

Collaborative Software Development with GitHub

Scritto da Marco Bizzantino | Sep 25, 2017 12:13:37 PM

Today, with Digital Transformation, a lot of companies belonging to different industries have understood the importance and the centrality of the Software to remain competitive. For this reason, they need to implement rapid and slim processes and smart projects to allow different teams to collaborate in real time and in complete transparency.

The increase of Open Source and collaborative projects has also highlighted the inadequacy of traditional systems that don’t fit with the transparency and the speed required today, becoming very often a bottleneck with deep repercussions on the business.

The solution for these problems lies in the democratizing of the code access, that brings a new level of transparency into the organizations. This new approach has been introduced by GitHub, the leading source code host in the world.

This solution has transformed the way in which software is created, bringing collaboration and codes revision directly into the developing process, enabling developers to discover, reuse and contribute to the code.

Today 24 million users think that GitHub is very useful for their work. With more than 66 million projects after only 9 years of existence, GitHub is a large and used platform where everyone can upload projects (typically software ones) and can work to propose changes and new features to the community. 

What GitHub is not

A lot of people think that GitHub is a closed social platform that only developers and geek can become part of.

Many people think also that GitHub is only a developing tool. But it is much more: it can be thought as a social platform that allows remote collaboration on projects of any argument, theme and sector.

After several successful projects all over the world, at the end of 2015 a collaborative deployment project started between the Italian Government and GitHub for the Public administration websites, in order to create projects together with companies and citizens. 

What is GitHub

GitHub is a platform for the code hosting and the collaborative development based on Git. It can be compared to a social network that works also as a file repository, with the opportunity to create paid hosting software for private projects, and free of charge for the open source one.

GitHub is the most authoritative and used platform for the collaborative development all over the world.

The development flux on which GitHub is based is called GitHub flow: this system allows to keep a clear and readable story of the software, simplifying the development and allowing teams to focalise and to distribute efforts on the single phases of implementation, correction, cleaning, release, giving them adequate spaces into the repository and timings into the flux.

Everything is monitored, and this allows to timely intervene on critical issues at any level of the process. 

The benefits of Software development with GitHub

The main benefits that you’ll have using GitHub are:

  • Transparency and collaboration within the Teams
  • Reduction in Software creation timings, especially in sectors and environments in which a rescue and a continuous update are required;
  • Elimination of space-time limits: all team members can contribute to the software creation/change, no matter where they are:
  • Simplifying of file change: GitHub keeps trace of every change made to the code and allows to have access to the entire code story, including previous versions;
  • Security: repository access control from a unique centralized location, no matter the size of the team. 

GitHub Enterprise

It is the software version for Companies. 15 million developers and thousands of companies all over the world (at the moment more than 75 thousand between governments, start-ups and other companies) are already using this platform to collaborate on code and to quickly create better software. GitHub Enterprise includes the same number of features as GitHub, but everything here is finalised to the execution on the company local network. All the repository data are stored on machines managed by users and the access is integrated with the company authentication system (LDAP, SAML or CAS). GitHub Enterprise includes also the support on the “pre-receive hooks”, a powerful tool that helps enforcing business critical rules to meet compliance requirements and to prevent any unwanted change.

With GitHub Enterprise it’s possible to maintain the entire process on a unique platform: developers can choose to work with the tools they prefer, like the continuous integration ones and hundreds of third-party apps and services.

 

Bring GitHub in your company

Whether your company is a start-up or a big business, with GitHub you can develop software securely with your near and remote colleagues. You can have conversations right next to the code, you can look for what you need, reuse already created codes and find and fix errors quickly.

GitHub is one of the DevOps solutions we suggest to face Digital Transformation and the consequent cultural change. If you need further information on what DevOps is, and what the benefits arising by the adoption of this Methodology are, download our 2017 Official Guide “What is DevOps”: