

Ask HN: How can I get my team to adopt SCM? - christopheraden

I don't work among programmers. Everyone on my team has a statistics degree, and most only had one or two CS classes in their undergraduate (for many, this was 15-25 years ago) and do not follow any of the practices or paradigms of software engineering rigorously. I've recently been trying to get subversion (one other guy knows it) or git (I know it, it seems nicer for programming without internet access), but my coworkers and boss cannot see the need. Most programs are only written by one person, but viewed by more than a dozen others, who submit revisions and requests via email, sometimes merging their own code in by hand. What perks of SCM can I cite that my team would find beneficial, other than making merges easier (a rare task we need to do)?
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username111
The number one perk for version control is... version control, there are
always mistakes made or some fix that ends up breaking everything and if you
don't have version control this becomes a giant pain in the ass but with it
you just switch to or look at an older version and problem solved.

The added team working enhancements are always secondary to version control
and if someone can't see the benefit of this it is going to be hard to argue.

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kat
I think SCM tracks history a lot better than an inbox. Even when I am coding
by myself, I like using source control so I can easily remember what I did two
days ago. Also having a history makes it easier to remove buggy features or
re-add features if business requirements change. Instead of searching through
an inbox folder, just view the history of a single file.

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christopheraden
This is the main reason I use git on my personal projects. I've found that
it's quite difficult to pitch this feature to my group. The cost of learning
an entirely new tech solution outweighs the benefits of version control in
their minds--a statement I disagree. I have no killer feature for them in SCM
that will make them want to start using it ASAP. Whether email is "good
enough" has been made to be a matter of opinion, unfortunately.

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mahesh_gkumar
Where is the source stored currently? On the hard disk of the one person who
usually writes the code? If so, what happens if he quits? Or if his machine
gets hacked? In short, if you loose your one copy of the code, what happens
then? How do you restore your application/source.

