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 would also recommend starting with implementing VCS (Version Control System) for yourself first. I'd recommend using one of distributed VCS (Git, Mercurial, Bazaar) rather than centralized Subversion, because it would be easier to create central repository (or repositories) by cloning than moving your Subversion repository to central place. Distributed SCM can be also used in a smaller group to exchange ideas.

A few advantages of (modern) version control systems:

• You can always revert (go back) to last working version of your code (provided that you follow some sane version control conventions, like at least tagging only tested code). With code shared via folders it might turn out that no one version works, backup copies were deleted to save space, and recovering code from backup is tedious / was never tested.

• You can switch between working on some new feature (some experimental work), and working on urgent fix in currently deployed version (maintenace work) thanks to branches (and stash / shelve for uncommitted work).

• If you follow good practices for version control (small and often commits, changes being about one single thing, writing good commit message describing change and whys of change) you would have much, much easier finding bugs, be it by bisecting history to find which change introduced bug, or by using version control system to look up who was responsible for given area of code (annotate / blame).