After retiring 15 years ago from professional software development, I had a clear picture of what source control should provide for a commercial development team:
- Prevention of simultaneous edits – avoiding the chaos when two developers unknowingly work on identical code
- Real-time visibility into who’s currently working on what files
- Version metadata embedded in code files – a lifesaver when you find a piece of code and need to know what version it is
- A comprehensive audit trail showing who modified which files and when
- Automatic version incrementing for every modification
- A single authoritative codebase representing the current production state
- The ability to roll back to any previous version
When a business opportunity pulled me out of retirement and back into managing a development team, I naturally asked about source control. The universal response? “We use Git.”
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