Git is very useful for helping small teams manage their software development processes, but there are ways you can make it even more effective. I’ve found a number of best practices that help my team, especially as new team members join with varying levels of Git expertise.

Formalize Git conventions for your team

Everyone should follow standard conventions for branch naming, tagging, and coding. Every organization has standards or best practices, and many recommendations are freely available on the internet. What’s important is to pick a suitable convention early on and follow it as a team.

Also, different team members will have different levels of expertise with Git. You should create and maintain a basic set of instructions for performing common Git operations that follow the project’s conventions.

Merge changes properly

Each team member should work on a separate feature branch. But even when separate branches are used, everyone eventually modifies some common files. When merging the changes back into the **master** branch, the merge typically will not be automatic. Human intervention may be needed to reconcile different changes made by two authors to the same file. This is where you have to learn to deal with Git merge techniques.

Modern editors have features to help with Git merge conflicts. They indicate various options for a merge in each part of a file, such as whether to keep your changes, the other branch’s changes, or both. It may be time to pick a different code editor if yours doesn’t support such capabilities.

#git #formalize git #git merge conflicts