How can I convince my department to implement a version control system?

Question

I recently joined the IT department of a big insurance company. Although the department\'s title is \"IT\", a lot of code gets written here; Java, JSP, JavaScript, COBOL and eve

Answer 1

I agree with the answer that are referring to the Joel Guerrilla article.

1. Install/Use some thing with a low overhead. Hg (Mercurial) is easy in a mixed eniroment and is good because you can bail out and use something else in an easy way.
2. You must share your things without making a fuzz about it. When someone needs your code, export it and use the "standard" corporate method (shared folder or whatever)
3. When you get code, always import it into a repos, if you think it is a new commit of a repos you already have, try to get it into that one.
4. Sooner or later you will have a code for several project and hopefully some commits on some repos. Then you can expose those with the mercurials webserver interface (hg serve -p XXXX).
5. When the times comes when someone don't know why something suddenly don't works as it should be and is trying to figure out why becase it was working last monday ... and you know that you have that code in a repos step up and ask if you can be of any assistance. Get the falty code, commit it into your repos and expose with hg serve. Look at it in the browser.

My point is that you must prove with real cases to your colleges that this stuff has a value. If the haven't figured it out by themselves after some many years you have a mountain to climb but it can be done. You must be patience though. It could very well take a year to convert one man (old dog). If you have any younger coworkers try to do this together, the more code you can get hold on the better.