What is source control?
A Source control system (or version control system) allows developers to collaborate on code and track changes. Use version control to save your work and coordinate code changes across your team. Source control is an essential tool for multi-developer projects.
The version control system saves a snapshot of your files (history) so that you can review and even roll back to any version of your code with ease. Also, it helps to resolve conflicts when merging contributions from multiple sources.
For most software teams, the source code is a repository of invaluable knowledge and understanding about the problem domain that the developers have collected and refined through careful effort.
Source control protects source code from catastrophe and the casual degradation of human error and unintended consequences.
Without version control, you're tempted to keep multiple copies of code on your computer. It could be dangerous. Easy to change or delete a file in the wrong code copy, potentially losing work.
Version control systems solve this problem by managing all versions of your code but presenting you with a single version at a time.
Tools and processes alone aren't enough to accomplish the above, such as adopting Agile, Continuous Integration, and DevOps. Believe it or not, all rely on a solid version control practice.
Version control is about keeping track of every change to software assets—tracking and managing the who, what, and when. Version control is the first step needed to assure quality at the source, ensure flow and pull value, and focus on the process. All of these create value not just for the software teams but ultimately for the customer.
Version control is a solution for managing and saving changes made to any manually created assets. If changes are made to the source code, you can go back in time and easily roll back to previous-working versions.
Version control tools will enable you to see who made changes, when, and what exactly was changed.
Version control also makes experimenting easy and, most importantly, makes collaboration possible. Without version control, collaborating over source code would be a painful operation.
There are several perspectives on version control.
For developers, it's a daily enabler for work and collaboration to happen. It's part of the daily job, one of the most-used tools.
For management, the critical value of version control is in:
- IP security.
- Risk management.
- Time-to-market speed through Continuous Delivery, where version control is a fundamental enabler.