Why should my team adopt source control? [closed]

Answer 1

The easiest way to convince management to invest Time in a SCCS is focus on backup and archival. By utilizing something like Subversion (SVN), you can restore any project to any point in time instantly. There is no need to have someone look through backup tapes or worry about tracking multiple versions in an obtuse directory structure.

There are obviously many other advantages (i.e. 2 people working on the same file at the same time), but backups are what quickly sold my company many years ago.

Answer 2

Before you say anything, find out why your company is not using source control.

Once you know why, it is easy to come up with scenarios where source control can help.

Answer 3

To avoid things like

     "Hey! What happens ? It worked yesterday."

Answer 4

Simply - so you have a true history of the code - to investigate changes (reasons for bugs), revert to versions, audit, etc. Backup isn't enough - you simply have a copy of the current picture. Ever change a file and wish you could remember what you did?

Answer 5

You have to use Source Control for these reasons

1) You can rollback to any version

2) Different developers can work on the same files

3) All developers, will have access to the same code base

4) You can track changes

5) You can rollback changes that don't work

6) Source control is the basis of continuous integration and helps massively with TDD

7) If you don't use source control, you will slowly go mad as files get lost/overwritten and nothing works as it should

VSS is not the worst SCC application, I used it for years and grew to hate it, but it does work, is simple, and many people know it.

Answer 6

I'm really sorry but if you actually have to argue for [the formalization of] source control in a development environment, you're in a hopeless situation. If your boss actually needs to be convinced that source control is a worthwhile endeavor, your boss is simply not suitable to be a manager of a group of software developers. In order for someone to effectively manage, they really need at the very least a basic understanding of the landscape. I can't even imagine what's going to happen when you actually need to argue for something that's worth having an argument and doing a presentation over.

Developing without source control is like driving a car without breaks. You lose the ability to do seamless concurrent development, you lose your code getting backed up in working copies, you lose the ability to do historic research via code annotations, you lose the benefit of seeing the context and comments that accompany discrete changes, you just lose, period. Using source control is so obvious and has so many benefits, it's shocking that you'd have to justify it.

At work, we use subversion, but some developers (myself included) use Git locally via the git-svn bridge. For personal work, I use Git.