Why is a version control program essential for large-scale software development?

Today’s software is growing in size, complicating the development process. Version control programs are effective in solving these problems and increase development productivity.

 

The size of today’s software is growing exponentially. The increasing power and pervasiveness of computers and the Internet has led to a huge increase in the number of users and a huge increase in the number of things they do with their computers. Users have come to expect software to be more feature-rich, faster, more accurate, and more secure, and to meet these demands, software has to be huge. The fact that Windows NT 3.1, released in 1993, consisted of 4-5 million LOCs, while Windows XP, released in 2001, consisted of approximately 45 million LOCs, is a good example of the increasing size of software.
As software has grown in size, the development process has naturally become much more complex, and projects that used to be run by a single person or a small group of people have expanded into large projects involving dozens to hundreds of developers. This increases the time and cost of development, and makes it more difficult to manage and maintain the workforce, making it harder to successfully complete software compared to smaller projects. In fact, over the past five years, the average success rate for software projects has been about 30%, while large projects have had a lower success rate of about 8%. To address this phenomenon, the need for tools that automate project management and troubleshooting arose, and many useful tools have since been developed, including version control programs, issue tracking and management tools, and continuous integration (CI) tools. Among them, version control programs such as Git and Subversion are very effective in solving maintenance-related problems. In this article, we’ll discuss three of the most important features that version control programs offer and the benefits of using them.
First, a version control program keeps a record of the progress of a project in a public workspace. Anything from fixing a typo to creating and deleting folders needs to be documented and approved by the project manager before it can be reflected in the public workspace. If you liken software development to a project where multiple architects are working on a single set of plans, then “contributing your work to the common workspace” is like one architect sending the entire project manager a draft and a revised version of the plans that looks like this

Title: Install additional first floor lobby windows
Description: Install additional windows to provide more light and ventilation in the first floor lobby.

The manager reviews the draft and the revisions, and if they look good, they incorporate the revisions into the plans. If they don’t understand the explanation, or if it’s unnecessary, they discuss it with the architect who worked on it to decide if it should be incorporated. Version control programs keep a systematic record of “drafts,” “changes made to the plans,” “discussions,” “authors,” and so on, so you can easily answer questions like “who worked on this part” and “why is this here?” later on. Additionally, if errors or unnecessary issues are not caught up front, it will be more expensive to fix them later, and a version control program can prevent errors and unnecessary changes from occurring before they are approved by a manager, drastically reducing the time required for maintenance.
Second, it provides the ability to merge and synchronize different tasks working on a project. Software is made up of many parts that do independent things. For example, even a simple game software is divided into parts that output the screen to the monitor, parts that handle sound, parts that handle the overall game flow, parts that read and store data, and so on. Software that is well organized in this way allows you to work on multiple parts at the same time, which greatly speeds up development. However, when working on a project in this way, the changes you make are not immediately reflected in other people’s personal workspaces, even if they are reflected in a centralized workspace. If architect A adds an extra floor to a 10-story building and gets it approved by his manager, it still looks like a 10-story building in the copy of another architect, B, who is working on the fifth floor. In order for B to reflect A’s work in his copy, he would have to get a new copy and repeat his work on the fifth floor. Version control programs provide a feature that can be useful in this situation. They save you the trouble of repeating yourself by automatically merging what you’re working on when you get a new copy. This is becoming an essential feature for managing large projects with independent development happening in parallel.
Finally, it gives you the ability to revert to any point in the project at any time. If you find a fatal error involving a critical part of your software or need to replace an existing feature with a new one, it’s often more time-saving to revert the project to the state it was in before the error occurred, or before the new feature was added, and then start developing anew. However, reverting back requires you to consult each file’s change history and actually revert the files back to their previous state, which can be very labor- and time-consuming to do manually in a large project because of the sheer number of files. A version control program can track the progress of a project and provide the ability to revert to any state of the project, making error recovery and upgrades simple. For example, if you’re painting a black wall white and accidentally paint over a window, instead of scraping the paint off the window or putting in a new window, you can go back to the state before you painted and repaint it.
The automated features provided by version control programs solve many of the problems that arise as software grows in size. It prevents developers from wasting time and effort on issues that are not directly related to the project and allows them to focus on issues that are directly related to the project and require creativity, making the development process more productive. In addition to large-scale software development, version control programs can also be applied to most projects that are done on a computer, such as documentation, Photoshop, or even small projects for assignments. When utilized properly, they can help software developers, designers, planners, students working on small projects, and many others enjoy working in a more relaxed environment.