5% false positives on people who have some symptoms of cancer isn’t bad. But 5% of a ‘high risk group’ could be a lot - particularly if the cancer is too early to confirm detection any other way yet and possibly not treatable for several years.
Reminds me a bit of the PSA test for prostate cancer. More of an early warning, but with the weak predictability, doctors are moving away from routine PSA tests.
If you only get endoscopies after positive results, you get an endoscopy every other year. If you skip the test and go straight to the endoscopy, you get one every year. Thus you get half as many tubes shoved down your throat if you get the blood test.
For a more reasonable false positive rate like 5%, you would have a 50/50 chance of getting a false positive any given decade. I'd much rather get 4 endoscopies than 40.
Indeed, for any false positive rate less than 100% (which isn't really a test to begin with) still on average decreases the number of endoscopies you need.
Really the metric that's important is the false negatives: if that's too high then I can't safely forego the endoscopy just because this year's blood test was negative. Even then though, if the blood test has a long lead time then maybe it's safe to wait and see how next year's blood test goes.
Even if the first option is "get more regular checkups over the next year+, to characterize the growth rate."
You don't have to nuke an organ from orbit, if you have historical data that indicates a tumor isn't aggressive. Or you would, if you've been watching it and it suddenly takes off.
But that doesn't make GitHub a bad idea.
Using an SCM tool isn’t going to cause additional problems except for reminding yourself of all the dumb mistakes you made last week.
You haven't worked at a shop that mandated Team Foundation Server, have you? ;)