GitHub review by Inspector Jones

In a word, GitHub is powerful. It’s widely used, both for open source development, and within development organisations.

Github is a set of tools for application development and project management - source code repositories, issue/bug tracking, code review, collaboration and wikis. Github also has a strong community of developers.

Before you use github for your business, here are the key things you need to know.

First, you may have heard of some publicised security concerns - we believe these were over-rated. Github do practice and preach good security - they have strong security measures, both technical and operational. More recently they have shown a good track record for dealing with security issues. While there have been a number of widely-publicised security events, these have often been due to user-error (like putting private files in public places), or people using GitHub to spread malicious code)

Second, there have been service outages. GitHub has been hit by multiple-hour major service outages in the past, including near-monthly major outages in late 2012. Outages such as these can seriously impact the productivity of development teams. While there has been improvement since late 2012, you may want to consider GitHub Enterprise, which allows you to use alternative hosting.

Third, consider GitHub Enterprise. This is a version of GitHub you can host privately, either on your own servers, or on a cloud service. As source code is high-risk information for many organisations, you may want to consider GitHub Enterprise to manage your risk of data loss or unavailability.

Finally, consider how to roll out GitHub across your organisation. We’ve found that organisations don’t properly estimate the disruption to development teams in moving source code repositories. We recommend a staged rollout, starting with the teams or projects which are most adaptable, eager and can get the most benefits from github first.