Should we be giving the client's management team direct access to our git hub repository so that they can see what we are up to in real time?

Question

Hi,

We are presently working for a client who is new to working with distributed teams. We have teams spread across India and the UK.

Although we have decent project tracking tools (Mingle), would it be a good idea to the give the PM at the client access to our git hub repo. Would this be make it easier for them (see what the devs are working on and an insight into what the team has been developing).

I agree that noot all commit messages would make sense to them but would this be a good way to boost their confidence in what we are doing? They already can check out our fortnightly releases on our QA and UA environments, but this still is behind dev by 5-6 days.

Also, is there any reporting for git hub which makes it easier for PM types to make sense of it all?

Thanks

Answer 1

They don't need access to the repository itself. Unless they are developers they wouldn't be able to make enough sense of what they were seeing to make it worthwhile.

I'd suggest giving them access to the results of your automated build, as in a report, and more importantly, a report showing the results of the test suite pass/failures.

Answer 2

I don't think there's any automated report that is a good substitute for a written or verbal run-down of what the team accomplished within a given period (day, week, whatever). If you want to provide commit messages along with your written or verbal report exclusively for corroboration, that would make more sense. There's no easy way out of this though, sometimes you have to spend more time than you'd like on communication, but it pays off to do it right.

Answer 3

As a general rule, I think that nothing good can come of giving clients access to source control repositories unless they're contributing to it in some way. My experience has been that doing so only generates questions (due to the lack of understanding mentioned in previous answers) that become a time sink for developers. If there are trust issues that biweekly releases can't soothe, then the relationship likely won't be salvaged by direct repository access.