Using GitHub for collaborative analysis

Recent trends have led to an increased importance being placed upon formal quality control processes for analysis conducted within the pharmaceutical industry and beyond. While a key feature of Stata is reproducibility through do- files and automated reporting, there are limited built-in tools for version control, code review, and collaborative analysis. Git is a distributed version control system, widely used by software development teams for collaborative programming, change tracking, and enforcement of best practices. Git keeps a record of all changes to a codebase over time, providing the ability to easily revert to a previous state, manage temporary branches, and combine code written by multiple people. Services such as GitHub build on the Git framework, providing tools to conduct code review, host source files, and manage projects. We present an overview of Git and GitHub, and explain how we use it for Stata projects at Adelphi Real World: an organisation specialising in the collection and analysis of real-world healthcare data from physicians, patients, and caregivers. We share an example project to outline the benefits of code review for both data integrity and as a training tool. We also discuss how, through implementing a software-development-like approach to the creation of ado-files, we can enhance the process of creating new programs in Stata and gain confidence in the robustness and quality of our commands.