Need of Version Control Systems
Version Control Systems helps developer team to manage changes to source code over time. Version Control Softwares plays main role here ’cause every developer team / software team / students working on a project , definitely uses a version control software to track every modification to the code in a special kind of database. If mistake is made, developers can turn back and compare earlier versions of code to fix the mistake while reducing burden to team members.
Software developers working in teams are continuously writing new source code and changing existing source code as per their or customer’s requirements. The code for a project is organized in a folder. One developer on the team may be working on a new feature while another developer fixes unrelated bugs by changing code, each developer may make their changes in several parts of the folder. Changes made in one part of the software can be incompatible with those made changes by another developer working at same time. This problem should be discovered and solved in a manner that without blocking the work of rest of the team.
Good version Control software supports a developer’s preferred workflow without imposing one particular way of working. The most commonly used and being used version control software is GitHub which is launched in 2008 and it’s code is written in programming language Ruby, it’s users reached 40.1 million in June 2018. Web developers love GitHub as it publishes the websites through GitHub Pages for free. Microsoft announced it had reached an agreement to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion. However, its users are increasing day by day and its popularity in field of Engineering also increasing.
Not only GitHub there are many other version control softwares some of them are:
- Bitbucket
- GitLab
- FogBugz Kiln/DevHub
- Beanstalk
- SourceForge
- Apache Allura
- Cloud Source by Google
- AWS CodeCommit
- GitKraken
Each of these softwares has their craze in society where as GitHub occupies first position in the free category though all the softwares mentioned above, more are open source and does the same work as GitHub.
Version control software is not only used by software team for software development but many other people like Document writers, Book writers, Researchers, Professors, Business Analysts, Students related to any branch uses this version control, but not as much as software developers.
Nearly everyone behind a keyboard has experienced a version control problem. How many times you have worked on a document and shared it with your colleague for flaws and they makes revisions and comments and sends it back. Meanwhile, you go home and then change bunch of things in original folder. You save your file as file.doc. Your colleague names their file as file1.doc. Neither one is original, so what do you do for next draft? It is easier to take your changes and add it to their document or it is easy to d it reverse?
This is very tedious procedure, Google solved this problem by creating Google slides, Google Docs, etc., there by any one in a team can create a Document using Google Docs and can share that through mail and provide edit access for team members , thereby no confusion in files and its version control problems.
This may look like developed version of Version Control but still there are still more issues to find and solve. As a behind keyboard person I also used Version Control softwares in my projects and behalf of that I do recommend Version Control softwares for those who work on projects. I prefer GitHub and it is not must to use GitHub as I’m used to it I go with flow.
Finally, I conclude that Version Control softwares have had solved problems of version control.
To use git software Freshers should have a good knowledge over git commands some of them are:
· git commit
· git clone
· git push
· git pull
and much more.
Check out this link for more commands “Git Commands”.
Also checkout this video:
Therefore, if you are a tech person, just get started with Git today and it will be very useful in your projects.