Having spent the past couple of weeks with a client working through the issues that need to be carefully considered when version controlling software, and in particular how to manage and control parallel development. I have come to three conclusions:
- People are often more afraid of the perceived problems than the practical realities of parallel development.
- People do not truly appreciate the problems and practical realities of version control and parallel development.
- There is a need for more theoretical work on the topic and, perhaps more significantly, a need for more formal expression of the process and problems involved.
- There is a quite substantial book that could be written on the subject.
The first two points are related to the last two insofar as people need a clear explanation of the discipline and, to really acquire a firm understanding of the subject, you need to commit to studying it. There is simply no easy way to explain the more complex material (and by simple I mean one side of A4 summaries demanded by people who think they need to know but who have no practical exposure to the technical nature of software development or version control — there is no ‘managers guide too..’).
As to the third point, I have expressed a concern about this before in various forums. Rather than continue to observe the problem I have decided to start doing something about it. So, over the coming weeks and months I will be expanding some ideas I’ve been mulling over for many years in a series of posts to this blog (special category set up here) and on my website. Be warned though, these articles will probably get very theoretical, often be speculative, and may raise as many new questions as they resolve existing ones. We shall see.
As for the final point, as I build up a sufficiently cogent set of material while writing on the blog (a process unlikely to be well structured), I will assemble more coherent articles on my website and who knows I might get round to pulling them together into a book one day. (Ha! Another of the many books I either intend to write or am in the process of writing but may never finish or publish — *sigh* so many things to do, so little time.) I may even pull material together and add it to the CM wiki or the ITSLM BoK. You never know, stranger things have happened.
Rather than start here, I’ll start an introductory post right now and hopefully have it up in the next day or two. In the meantime, you could check out some past posts on the subject; here and here
