Any guidelines out there for contributing to GitHub?

I am working with a team who have recently adopted GitHub with very little standards set on contributing to GitHub. This has caused some workflows to be inconsistent across the repos. For example, there are commits that would frequently be pushed that just say “test” with quite a bit of code added or removed that remains changed after the commit. There is usually no follow-up on what has been modified, making referring back to previous commits quite the hassle.

There is also a recent case where my colleague had a branch that was automatically generated by GitHub after pushing a commit. The colleague stored all his changes to this new branch before the project was unassigned from him and assigned to me. The branch ended being named a randomly generated number (i.e. “#123456”), and after checking it out I found it was in a detached HEAD state.

I’ve had several years of GitHub experience prior to working here across different development careers. The teams I worked with had very consistent guidelines already in place and it was very easy to understand how things should be formatted. These guidelines I found were similar across other GitHub projects out there, so adapting to other team standards went pretty smoothly.

However, since GitHub is fairly new to this team, contributing standards and processes has been varied. I want to send off something to my team lead and propose we start adopting some guidelines. Are there any standards out there that I can reference?

Might want to start here:

https://help.github.com/articles/setting-guidelines-for-repository-contributors/

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