Who Doesn't Use Source Control?

VegeBrain asks: "I was reading the description for for a new book, Pragmatic Version Control using CVS and was shocked to read that 'Half of all project teams in the U.S. don't use any version control at all...' Is this true? If so, why? I can't imagine being without one so I'm wondering why anybody would avoid using one, especially now when so many are available for free. Am I missing something here and there really are reasons to not use a VCS?"

Comments

Ignorance

[hsoft]

Don't underestimate the power of ignorance. My 2 last employers didn't use a VCS because they didn't know that this kind of things existed. Of course, they now know, because I installed them one. :)

No Version Control

[SteveX]

I joined about two years ago that had just completed the transition from everyone having their own copy of the source, to using CVS.

Funny thing is, some of the developers missed the old ways, and would occasionally slip back into old habits. A customer would have a problem, and one of the developers make a copy of the entire source tree, fix the problem, build it, send it to the customer, and that'd be it.

People would send modules to other people to merge with their copy...

It seems bizarre but it happens.

Also I wonder if the stat isn't skewed by the number of solo developers working on small projects... You don't really need revision control until your project reaches a certain size. Not a big size mind you - if you've spent a week on a project it's probably big enough to merit cvs - but I think a lot of projects are smaller than that.

--
http://www.stevex.org/longtail

I'd like to add

[hsoft]

The school I went to never teached me to use a versionning system. I had to:

- Wonder what this "CVS" thing on SF was about
- Go to the cvs website, still wondering what it was really used for.
- Download it and try it.
- Finally understand what it is, and wonder how I could have been without it during my whole CS and survive. (Well, not my whole CS, since I learnt about CVS at the before the end of it.)

It only takes a couple of unaware teachers to train a whole generation of ignorant developers.

Argh.

[crmartin]

Am I missing something here and there really are reasons to not use a VCS?"

No, you're not. But I tell you what --- I've been consulting for, oh, close to 20 years, and I've seen probably in excess of 200 companies, and I'd hate to tell you how many of them had no version control. Hell, I'd hate to tell you how many of them had no code backup, and you'd be amazed how many companies --- big companies --- have web applications in particular that live on someone's desktop and couldn't be reconstructed if that person was run over by a truck without reimplementing.

I'd hate to tell you, but I'll say, if it's as high as 50 percent who have version contral, then that means it's about doubled in the last few years.

Ignorance? Fear?

[esm]

I graduated with a CS major almost 20 years ago, and have been making my living since then as a programmer. I never learned anything about source control in collij. I learned it during collij, because I worked summers at a professional organization. I was lucky.

Most of my jobs have been in professional software development groups, where source control is as implicit as breathing. But for a few years I worked at a prestigious National Lab, and that was an eye opener. Much of the code I saw was written by scientists with no real-world experience. Nobody I worked with had ever heard of the concept of source control; they just sort of did occasional "cp foo.c foo-with-xyz.c" things. I set up CVS, explained the rationale, helped them learn it, and forced them to use it. Most appreciated it, because they could see how much it helped. They simply hadn't known. But... some resented it. "That's not the way we do things". (My wife still works at that Lab, also as a programmer, and says she sees the same thing). For the most part, the people who say that are stupid. Not 100%, since many have PhDs, but truly stupid nonetheless. And they know it, which scares them: they think if they use source control, others can touch their code and make it better, and they won't be needed any more. Job security through obscurity, perhaps.

Think about it: if you're competent, you use source control as much as possible: you know you'll screw up sometimes, you want a strong history of what changed when, and you want others to improve and maintain your code. But if you're not competent (or uncertain), you want others to have as little visibility as possible into your code and process.