Without SCM development is slower because contributors have to take extra effort to plan a non-overlapping sequence of develop for release. SCM will reduce a team’s communication overhead and increase release velocity.

This offers insight and transparency into the progress of a project that can be shared with end users or non-development teams. A clean and maintained SCM history log can be used interchangeably as release notes. The SCM archive of every change over a project's life time provides valuable record keeping for a project's release version notes. This is extremely valuable for preventing regressions on updates and undoing mistakes. The SCM can instantly revert the codebase back to a previous point in time. This historical record can then be used to ‘undo’ changes to the codebase. Once SCM has started tracking all the changes to a project over time, a detailed historical record of the projects life is created. In addition to version control SCM provides a suite of other helpful features to make collaborative code development a more user friendly experience. This allows developers to examine and review edits that may have introduced bugs or regressions. The SCM tracks an entire history of changes to the code base. The team can then monitor and discuss the work in progress that the SCM is monitoring. This foundational conflict prevention mechanism has the side effect of providing passive communication for the development team. SCM will then communicate these points of conflict back to the developers so that they can safely review and address. These safeguards work by tracking changes from each individual developer and identifying areas of conflict and preventing overwrites. SCM brought version control safeguards to prevent loss of work due to conflict overwriting. SCM’s role as a protection mechanism against this specific scenario is known as Version Control. Developer 1 would make edits and Developer 2 would unknowingly save over Developer 1’s work and wipe out the changes.

Developers would edit text files directly and move them around to remote locations using FTP or other protocols. Therefore developer 1 working on Feature 1 could make some edits and find out later that Developer 2 working on Feature 2 has conflicting edits.īefore the adoption of SCM this was a nightmare scenario.

Separate developers may be working on a seemingly isolated feature, however this feature may use a shared code module. When multiple developers are working within a shared codebase it is a common occurrence to make edits to a shared piece of code. The importance of source code management tools

Mangameeya source code