Good Practices for Working with a New Repo
There are a few steps you can do to save yourself from having to deal with unnecessary issues later on when contributing to a code base. If you’ve ever found yourself building and testing your code only to realize that you’re running into problems that make no sense and are seemingly unrelated to code that your wrote, you should read on.
1) Get the code.
2) Build it. Do this before doing any changes.
3) Run ALL the tests. Make sure these pass before you touch anything.
That’s it! Once you’re able to build and test without any of your changes, you have established a valid baseline for yourself to work from. Anything that goes wrong from this point on is probably related to something you did.
Often times, by following these steps, you can even find and report bugs that exist in the code base without actually having made changes yourself. This is very valuable for your team.