From Forks to Branches: Streamlining Team Git Workflows
As part of a GitHub working group within a 50-person technical writing team, I recently helped lead our transition from a fork-based workflow to a centralized branching strategy. This shift simplified our collaboration model and reduced friction across four sub-teams. Here’s what we learned.
The Challenge
Section titled “The Challenge”Our team of technical writers was using personal forks of our main documentation repository. While this approach worked, we identified several pain points:
- Extra complexity for common operations
- Confusion about which remote to push/pull from
- Inconsistent workflows across team members
- Limited value for our use case compared to open-source projects
The GitHub working group formed with representatives from each sub-team to evaluate whether forks still made sense for our internal collaboration model.