Use a decent Source Code Management Tool |
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| Written by Graham Stoney | |||
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You need a lightweight yet industrial-strength source code management (SCM) tool that supports the process which you want to use. A good tool and a solid process are worth their weight in gold, but you don't need to pay an arm and a leg. Avoid tools which use locking such as VSS, because they don't scale. It's not enough simply for a tool to allow you to avoid locking – the tool needs to truly support a copy-modify-merge paradigm if you're going to work efficiently. Pick a cross-platform tool, so you aren't stuck on the one development platform for all time. All of the really good SCM tools are cross-platform; and I don't just mean “runs on different versions of Windows”. You don't need universal server support, but you do need a client that runs just about anywhere. There are plenty of different systems around with client support for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc etc. I don't like highly-customizable tools as they tend to require lots of customization; nor ones that are reliant on servers for basic operations like compiling/building or debugging, as they slow down an already slow and time-wasting operation. If you want to pay money for a commercial tool, I've had excellent experience with Perforce. If you want something free, I recommend Subversion. For Microsoft Windows users, TortoiseSvn integrates Subversion with the file explorer and is extremely cool. I used to like CVS, but it doesn't maintain the notion of a logical change beyond check-in time, so I wouldn't recommend it for any new projects now that Subversion is available. If you want powerful defect tracking integration, I recommend Perforce with Jira. Social Bookmark this page:         
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