Alice can peek at what Bob did without merging first, using the "fetch"
command; this allows Alice to inspect what Bob did, using a special
symbol "FETCH_HEAD", in order to determine if he has anything worth
pulling, like this:

------------------------------------------------
alice$ git fetch /home/bob/myrepo master
alice$ git log -p ..FETCH_HEAD
------------------------------------------------

This operation is safe even if Alice has uncommitted local changes.

Alice can also use gitk to browse that Bob did:
------------------------------------------------
alice$ gitk master origin/master
------------------------------------------------

After inspecting what Bob did, if there is nothing urgent, Alice may
decide to continue working without pulling from Bob.  If Bob's history
does have something Alice would immediately need, Alice may choose to
stash her work-in-progress first, do a "pull", and then finally unstash
her work-in-progress on top of the resulting history.

When you are working in a small closely knit group, it is not
unusual to interact with the same repository over and over
again.