How not to step on somebody’s work: Version Control System

AUTHOR: Guillermo Lapuente Valea
(Esta entrada también está disponible en castellano)

Version Control is what we know as the usage of tools and techniques for noticing what has been lastly modified of a software development. In this kind of developments is common to work in teams, and some of these teams’ members will probably have to work on the same module. The traditional way of doing this is knowing if the code has been modified or not, to keep working on the modified one. On top of that, it was odd having to work with people who were geographically distant. As the time kept running, more efficient and modern techniques were needed, crowdsourcing was beginning…

What could be done about it? The Version Control Systems appeared. The most known ones are: bitbucket, github, subversion…

With these tools we can:

• Share code: the code is shared almost in real time and thanks to this, we can work on updated code. This really helps the crowdsourcing that allows us to have the code shared with different people.
• Monitor work: when a team members updates the code, this change will be registered. This way it is very easy to see what the real dedication of each member is, and we can also see who did the change.
• Fit it in our IDE’s: bitbucket, github or subversion can be used in Eclipse or Visual Studio. We would save changes like we would normally do, but instead of being saved locally, the changes would be done in the cloud.
• Have divided code: we could have different application parts or full applications in different repositories.

We should see this software as a tree, in which there is a master branch where the final and accepted changes are made. When a change is proposed a leave comes out of the master branch with the change. This change can be revised and it can finally be set to the master branch or discarded. Nevertheless, getting to know how everything works has a learning process which can take up an hour if someone helps us.

Here are some easy-to-follow tutorials to begin with:
Installation and use of Github: https://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/User_Guide
Installation and use of Bitbucket: https://crunchify.com/how-to-configure-bitbucket-git-repository-in-you-eclipse/