The best software engineering practices to develop bioinformatic programs
A very good essay about git branching: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
Fetch a pull request to local environment and test it: http://socorro.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reviewprocess.html
Checking out Pull Requests locally (github only): https://help.github.com/articles/checking-out-pull-requests-locally