ACCU 2014 Session Proposal

Title: Version Control – Patterns & Practices

Type: Tutorial

Duration: 90 minutes

Speaker: Chris Oldwood

Location: Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, UK

Session Description

After the text editor and programming language the next most valuable, hotly debated and often poorly used tool is probably the version control system. Some treat it as nothing more than an ad-hoc backup of their source code whilst others endeavour to create a narrative that describes the evolution of their entire software product from inception to decommission.

This session takes a walk through the software development lifecycle and examines the role the source control system plays – what we store, why we store it, how we change it and then later how we reconstruct what was changed and why. We’ll look at the various forces that dictate our branching (and subsequent merging) strategies along with some of the less contentious policies we can adopt to ensure our system continues to evolve reliably whilst maintaining a traceable narrative.

Despite the range of commercial and open source SCM products out there the patterns and practices I will discuss here are almost universal. For the Software Archaeologist preserving history across file/folder moves and renames is just one aspect where tool specific knowledge matters. But before we can get there we need to deal with their lack of agreement on a common vernacular…

Speaker Biography

Chris is a freelance developer who started out as a bedroom coder in the 80’s writing assembler on 8-bit micros; these days it’s C++ and C# in plush corporate offices. He also commentates on the Godmanchester duck race and can be contacted via gort@cix.co.uk or @chrisoldwood.