How to Choose best Version Control Software

You’ll need to consider your development process, the amount and types of files your team works with, and organizational goals at a high level. When choosing a VCS tool, there are a few things to keep in mind.

What is Version Control Software 

In a specific type of database, version control software maintains track of every change to the code. If a mistake is made, developers may go back in time and compare older versions of the code to help solve the problem while causing the slightest disturbance to the rest of the team.

Software engineers working in groups are constantly developing new code and updating current code. A project’s, app’s, or software component’s code is usually structured in a folder structure. The Dev team may be working on different code to solve an unrelated problem; each developer’s modifications may be made in stages.

Perhaps you’ve commented out code blocks because you want to disable a feature without removing the code. After all, you’re afraid it could come in handy later. Version control is a solution to these issues.

Benefits of Version Control Software

For high-performing software and DevOps teams, using version control software is a best practice. Version control also helps developers work more quickly and allows software teams to maintain efficiency and agility as the team grows.

While it is feasible to build software without utilizing version control, this exposes the project to a significant risk that no competent team should take. So the question isn’t whether you should use version control, but which version control system you should use.

When you choose your office software you always see the requirements. In this same way before you decide your version control you should consider your Dev team requirements.

This post will highlight a few key points that you should consider when choosing the best version control software. 

How to choose best Version Control Software

Team Collaboration

Version control is based on collaboration. When selecting a version control system, the ability to allow team communication should be a top priority.  

Easy to use

It’s a no-brainer to have team members work simultaneously, but even those working alone can benefit from the flexibility to work on separate streams of updates. Using VCS tools to create a “branch” maintains various streams of work differently while also allowing developers to merge them back together, allowing them to check that the changes on each branch do not conflict.

Many software development teams use the best practice of branching for each feature, each release, or both. When deciding how to use the branching and merging features in VCS, teams may select from several alternative processes.

Complete History

Every file has a comprehensive long-term modification history. This refers to all of the changes made throughout time by many people. The ability of different VCS programs to manage to rename and relocate files varies.

The author, date, and written comments on the reason for each modification should all be included in this history. 

Having a comprehensive history allows you to go back to prior versions to aid with bug root cause investigation, which is essential when working on older software versions. 

Almost everything may be deemed an “earlier version” of the program if it is actively developed.

Traceability

Being able to log each change made to the program and connect it to project management and bug tracking tools like Jira and annotating each shift with a note indicating the modification’s purpose and intent can aid not only in root cause analysis and other forensics.

When reading the code and attempting to understand what it is doing and why it is created the way it is, having the annotated history of the code at your fingertips may help developers make proper and harmonic modifications in line with the system’s system planned long-term design. 

This is especially significant when working with old code and is necessary for developers to work efficiently.

Security

Some version control systems have more built-in security measures than others. The dispute over distributed vs. centralized version control systems is a typical example of this issue. We’ll go through this in further detail later.

Some teams want access control down to the file level rather than simply the repository or area. Depending on the version control system, the amount of granularity with which you may regulate these aspects varies.

Summary

Git is a kind of version control that many companies use. Git is a distributed version control system that is free and open-source, unlike Subversion. Git was designed with speed, simplicity, and an entirely distributed approach in mind when it was first established. It’s really easy to learn Git from open source,stack overflow or from different informative blogs.

Many of the advantages of SVN come from its centralized character, and the same can be said about Git and its distributed capabilities. Git is perfect for remote teams with an agile mindset. Because developers have access to the whole history with Git commands of their neighborhood, the workflow will be faster due to the repository.

While it is feasible to build software without utilizing version control, this exposes the project to a significant risk that no competent team should take. So the question isn’t whether you should use version control, but which version control system you should use. And hope this article will help you to decide the following version control for your team.