Importance of Version Control

Whether You are developing a small application or creating a complex business solution, You certainly need to keep track of the code, store a change history, have regular backups in case something goes wrong.

Imagine a company with hundreds of developers working on a single project, improving existing code or adding new functionalities simultaneously… Sure it would be a mess and a huge pain to have regular backups of the codes, check the integrity of individual modules and keep track of every change.

What if you wanted to check the changes that were made in the last 30 days, or see which developer wrote the most code. And if something broke after the last change You would need to search in a thousand of file copies trying to find the culprit of the critical bug. That’s were version control comes to save the day.

We wouldn’t make a discovery if we told that programming had been around a long time, and believe it or not, but technologies for managing and helping with huge amount of code were around for almost two decades. Since the beginning, there were a lot of variations for solving this common problem, and those solutions have evolved and changed a lot. Nowadays most common solutions for controlling software versions are Git and Mercurial. There are major differences between the two, but they share a common logic and purpose in assisting the development process.

Version Control System or VCS in short, keeps a copy of all the source codes, and stores the changes for each file separately, so it can be reviewed. Commonly, the main information stored for each change are a short message, description, date, the author of the change and a unique identifier for the change.

You can read more about VCS in this article, where Git system is explained in details.