Collaboration

Git gives you the mechanics of version control. Collaboration is the set of conventions a team layers on top so that several people can work on one repository without getting in each other's way.

Issues are how work gets recorded and discussed. Anything that needs doing is an issue, so the reasoning survives after the conversation.

Pull requests are how a change gets proposed. You push a branch, open a pull request against the base branch, and ask for it to be merged. The diff, the discussion and the decision all live in one place.

Reviews are the approval step. Reviewers comment on specific lines, request changes, and approve when they are happy. Branch protection rules on the base branch can require a review, and status checks, before a merge is allowed at all — which turns a convention into something the server enforces.

CODEOWNERS assigns reviewers by path, so changes to a given directory automatically ask the people who know that code.

The workflow that falls out of this is the standard one: branch from main, commit in small pieces, open a pull request, respond to review, merge, and delete the branch.

Start with Issues and Pull Requests, then set up branch protection on a real repository and see what it blocks.

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