Ship it!

2 Manage Assets

Most corporations have large systems and staff dedicated to asset management. That is, they keep track of all of the corporation’s valuable physical assets—computers, cars, buildings, office staplers, and so on. On a software project, you have a somewhat simpler task: all you need to keep track of are files. But you need to keep track of every version of every file used in the build, from the beginning of the project onward.

For this formidable task, you need a source code management (SCM) system, also called a version control (VC) system. These systems act as gifted librarians, keeping track of all of your assets (files) in a repository (or database) and coordinating safe access to your files. These systems store your source ...