Program version control policies

By now, you would have thoroughly understood the basics of Version Control and the benefits of Version Control. Now, you know why this system is so widely used and why small or big company opts for Version Control. Reach out to us in the comment section of this article and our experts look into them to provide answers as soon as possible.

Ishan Gaba is a Research Analyst at Simplilearn. Graduated in Information Technology, Ishan is also passionate about writing and traveling. Previous Next. Tutorial Playlist. Table of Contents View More. Some of the significant challenges faced by such companies are: Challenges Collaboration There are so many people located at different places, there may be a need to communicate for a particular reason, or a set of people are working on the same project but from other regions.

Storing Versions The project is completed into several versions; in that situation, keeping all such commits in a single place is a considerable challenge. Restoring Previous Versions Sometimes, there is a need to go back to the earlier versions to find the bug's root cause.

Figure Out What Happened It is critical to know what changes were made to the previous versions of the source code or where exactly the changes have been made in a file. The implicit merging that a centralized version control system performs when you update is a common source of confusion and mistakes. In a distributed version control system, if you have uncommitted changes in your working copy, then you cannot run update or other commands like git pull or hg fetch that themselves invoke update.

The reason is that it would be confusing and error-prone for the version control system to try to apply edits, when you are in the middle of editing. You will receive an error message such as. Before you are allowed to update , you must first commit any changes that you have made you should continue editing until they are logically complete first, of course. Now, your repository database contains simultaneous edits — the ones you just made, and the ones that were already there and you were trying to apply to your working copy by running update.

You need to merge these two sets of edits, then commit the result. In Mercurial, you will typically just run hg fetch , which performs the merge and commit for you. The reason you need the commit is that merging is an operation that gets recorded by the version control system, in order to record any choices that you made during merging.

In this way, the version control system contains a complete history and clearly records the difference between you making your edits and you merging simultaneous work. These best practices do not cover obscure or complex situations.

Once you have mastered these practices, you can find more tips and tricks elsewhere on the Internet. It only takes a moment to write a good commit message.

This is useful when someone is examining the change, because it indicates the purpose of the change. This is useful when someone is looking for changes related to a given concept, because they can search through the commit messages. Each commit should have a single purpose and should completely implement that purpose.

This makes it easier to locate the changes related to some particular feature or bug fix, to see them all in one place, to undo them, to determine the changes that are responsible for buggy behavior, etc. The utility of the version control history is compromised if one commit contains code that serves multiple purposes, or if code for a particular purpose is spread across multiple different commits. During the course of one task, you may notice another issue and want to fix it too.

You may need to commit one file at a time — the commit command of every version control system supports this. If a single file contains changes that serve multiple purposes, you may need to save your all your edits, then re-introduce them in logical chunks, committing as you go. Here is a low-tech way to do this; each version control system also has more sophisticated mechanisms to support this common operation.

Sometimes it is too burdensome to separate every change into its own commit. However, aiming for and often achieving this goal will serve you well in the longer term. As a rule, I do not run git commit -a or hg commit or svn commit without supplying specific files to commit. If you supply no file names, then these commands commit every changed file. You may have changes you did not intend to make permanent such as temporary debugging changes ; even if not, this creates a single commit with multiple purposes.

When I want to commit my changes, to avoid accidentally committing more than I intended, I always run the following commands:. Work with the most up-to-date version of the files as possible. That means that you should run git pull , git pull -r , hg fetch , or svn update very frequently. I do this every day, on each of over projects that I am involved with.

When two people make conflicting edits simultaneously, then manual intervention is required to resolve the conflict. But if someone else has already completed a change before you even start to edit, it is a huge waste of time to create, then manually resolve, conflicts.

You would have avoided the conflicts if your working copy had already contained the other person's changes before you started to edit. Once you have committed the changes for a complete, logical unit of work, you should share those changes with your colleagues as soon as possible by doing git push or hg push. So long as your changes do not destabilize the system, do not hold the changes locally while you make unrelated changes.

The reason is the same as the reason for incorporating others' changes frequently. This advice is slightly different for centralized version control such as Subversion. Related Policy: CSU Information Security Policy - Change Control Cal Poly Information Security Program [pdf] Introduction: Version control systems allow tracking and documentation of changes to software, management of concurrent access when multiple people must work on the same files, comparison of the differences between versions of source code, and simplified recovery to an earlier version in case of errors.

Scope: This standard applies to any departments that develop and maintain web applications. Standard: Required: A version control system must be used to track and retain information about changes. The version control system, along with its data, must be backed up on a regular basis.

I prefer to stick with just the number. However, if you want to include v in your file names, go ahead. It would make the file name look like this:. Personally, I think that looks too informal for large projects being run with a super structured methodology, but do whatever suits your team.

You want to make a separate copy, which may or may not be stored in a separate location in the central repository. During the project close phase you can make decisions about what files to keep and which to delete. I tend to save them all. Check your document management policies and see what your organization wants you to do. It is better to use good document management principles, and keep the versions you need. The other issue with using automated versioning is having to deal with conflict resolution.

This happened recently on one of my projects. A colleague and I were working on the same spreadsheet. She was in it and I was in it, multiple times over the course of a couple of days, and because of conflicts, Excel kept saving different versions. In the end, she had to go through all the versions we had accidentally created and consolidate them all. Try to avoid that by starting out as you mean to go on! Tips on capturing lessons learned in project management including templates that you can use on all of your projects.

Get a free done-for-you list of example project success criteria in this article, along with everything you need to know about writing and using success criteria for your project. It really is the definitive guide!