Lead Dev 2016 London: Telling stories through your commits

• Joel Chippindale @joelchippindale
• CTO Future works
• slides: https://speakerdeck.com/mocoso/telling-stories-through-your-commits-lead-developer-conference-2016

The key challenge is to manage complexity: name, design, refactoring, automated tests all need to convey the intent about software, and so does the VCS history.

A VCS system is:

• kept forever
• always up to date
• searchable (with git)

Three principles:

1. Make atomic commits
   • 1 single change by commit
   • the minimal viable commit is the smallest usefull commit
   • “A & B” needs to be splitted into 2 commits
2. Write good commit messages
   • one title line
   • a longer description
   • an explanation of why the change is being made
   • perhaps a discussion of context and/or alternatives that were considered
3. Revise development history before sharing
   • tell a useful and simple story

How to make the team adopt these practices ? Use the 3 principles yourself all the time.