Version Control Systems in Corporations:Centralized and Distributed-An explorative case study into the corporate use of version control systems

摘要

Version control systems are important to all software developmentcompanies, and has been in use since the 1970s.This case study examines the e ects version control systemshave on two companies' con guration management strategies,and analyzes if a particular way of working inuencesthe use of version control systems.The study's main contribution is an analysis in how companieswork with version control systems, and what drawbacksthey see in their current systems. The analysis yields bothexpected and unexpected results, and the implications canprobably be generalized to any software development company.The units of analysis for this case study are two di erentlysized software development companies in Sweden. Betweenthem they represent both co-located and distributed teams;and using both centralized and distributed version controlsystems.Our conclusions are most notably that the type of versioncontrol system only has a limited e ect on the con gurationmanagement strategy. We also found that features that aredesired by companies are more user-friendly graphical userinterfaces, atomic commits, better merging tools, integrationwith project lifecycle, and better handling of dfferent file types.