If you want to complete a project with lofty goals, the best way to do that is with a team. Here’s how.
Group coding is the best way to build a killer app. There is a reason why companies have massive developer teams. It’s not as simple as it may seem though! Multiple people pushing to a Github repository will cause a lot of headaches if you aren’t careful, and if your team isn’t all on the same page, you may end up stepping on each other’s toes rather than sharing the workload.
The most important thing for any team is communication! Before a single line of code gets written, make sure all team members understand what the goal is. Try and identify your fortes and assign everyone a main focus for the project. Come up with a few long-term and short-term goals as a squad and then go tackle them. I’ve found a lot of success using Trello for task management.
Meetings should be semi-frequent and small updates should be given regularly just so you and your team can adapt to unforeseen factors. Trust me, there will be unforeseen factors😅.
A huge coding-specific hurdle you will have to overcome is your Git workflow. I highly suggest you take a peek at that link to learn more about workflows and which suits your needs, but I’ll give a quick overview.
I’ll start with the simplest workflow, a Centralized Workflow. Your repo will have only one branch. Anyone who intends to push up new code must first pull from your repository. Like I said this workflow is dead simple, but collaboration is quite clunky and error-prone. Your team will basically take turns making changes to your code. If two people make changes to the same file, you will run into a merge conflict and decide what lines of code to keep or discard.
The next workflow is a Feature Branch Workflow. This is best for small to medium-sized projects. Your repository will have a separate branch for each feature you plan to implement. Pull requests should be submitted when a new feature is ready to be merged into the main branch.
The last workflow I will mention is GitFlow, the industry standard for large projects. With GitFlow there are five branch types. main, development, feature, bug fix, and hotfix. The main and feature branches are the same as in a Feature Branch Workflow. A development branch is for your team to implement a completed feature that is not ready for production. Your bug fix branches are pretty self-explanatory, they are small patches to fix bugs found in your app, and hotfixes are similar, only they patch bugs found in production. Here is a quick video visualization of this workflow.
