Setting up your GitHub Org and Workflows
Background
At the core of all DevOps pipelines are the Source Repository and the Process Workflows. It might be tempting to rush ahead and create a personal account to code with. But when you start working as part of a team the emphasis should be on collaboration. Take some time to think about how you want your team to work. Read up on the different workflow methodologies such as Agile, Waterfall or Lean. You’ll also need to consider which branching methodology you want to use to complement this approach.
In our example organisation we are going to adopt a Lean methodology coupled with Git Feature Branch and use a Kanban Board to track our work.
Lean
We are a small team with an emphasis on learning and iteration to develop our skills and knowledge. This will require frequent review and gathering of metrics to better inform our decision-making abilities.
Git Feature Branch
We want to work in a delivery-ready state quickly adding features and responding to our critical feedback. As part of a small team, it’s more likely that will take a divide-and-conquer approach to build out our infrastructure and continuous pipelines.
Kanban
We love a good visualisation of our work! We’ve added a blocked column to emphasise where we have waste in our process. Being a small team any waste will have a BIG impact on what we achieve. Anything that ends up in this column requires our attention and figuring out what we can do to reduce or eliminate the issue. Equally, we want to ensure we are only taking on needs as we have the capacity to meet them – larger organisations could use a backlog weighting to decide how much resource they need to hire where ours is fixed and small.
Creating your Github Organisation
Step 1: Create your Github account (thinking of a sensible username as it will be public)
Reminder: Add 2MFA to your account since this will contain your source code!
Step 2: Follow this documentation to set up your organisation
Step 3: We are going to set up a global project that spans multiple repositories. For us, this is best as our work will space across different logical partitions of code.
Step 4: Pick an appropriate name. Since our board is going to be an overview of the organisation we’ve named it that but you might want to go with something more descriptive e.g. UI Development
Step 5: Github will start off the board with some basic columns. We’ve added our own so we can better track the work
That’s it! Your board is now set up. We can start adding ideas..