Question

I am sure everyone knows that Source Control is a core component of responsible software development. Like software development practices most organisations have differing policies and procedures in working with their chosen Source Control Management Tool; Subversion, GIT, TFS, etc.

My question is around how you provide training for new and existing staff in the area of Source Control management? Do you provide staff documentation, videos, brown bag sessions, formal training from an accredited provider or something else?

Answer 1

The training I give (one formal training, with some slides) is mainly centered around the release management process.

It means I don’t so much show the basic function of the VCS we use (the user figure them out pretty quickly anyway), but I insist on how the VCS features are used to produce a release (which is what all the development is about: if you don’t ship something in production, the all game is kind of pointless)

So:

• when should you branch and why?
• when should you merge and why (not so much how)?
• where your deliveries (binaries, war, jar,ear) should go (hint: not in a VCS)
• where should you get all your dependencies.

In other word, I try to insist on how the VCS is not an extra obstacle to manage, but one of the tool there to facilitate the next release.

Note: this is an enterprise-centric point of view (where many internal projects depend on many other internal projects), and can be very different from a decentralized open-source development project (where a project is often — not always — monolithic, with only libraries external dependencies).