Ask Slashdot: Explaining Version Control To Non-Technical People?

New submitter billius writes "I was recently hired (along with another guy) as a web developer at a large university. Our job is to build tools to support the social science researchers on our team. When I got here the codebase was an unholy mess: the formatting was terrible, there were .bak files scattered everywhere and there was no version control system in place. We quickly went to work cleaning things up and implementing new features. My boss was so pleased with our work that she took us out to lunch. During lunch, she asked us if there were any additional tools we needed to do our job more efficiently. We both told her that version control was an invaluable tool for any kind of software development, but had a difficult time describing to her what exactly version control was. I attempted to explain that it created a log of all the changes made to the code and allowed us to make sure that multiple developers working on the same project would not step on each other's toes. I don't think we really got through to her and a few weeks passed with us hearing nothing. Today we were asked by another supervisor if we needed any additional tools and we went through the same spiel about version control. She suggested that we try to write up a brief description of what we wanted and how much it would cost, but I'm drawing a blank an how exactly to describe version control to a person who isn't very technical, let alone a developer. Does anyone out there have any tips on how to sell version control to management?"

Comments

Re:How Much Would What Cost?

[CastrTroy]

The problem is that you can't do a diff between Word documents. Source control and diffing tools work great on source code because it's all just plain text. But for things like Word documents or Powerpoint presentations things get a little more complicated. Sure with a version control service you won't lose any previous versions, but you don't know what changed between versions either. To me this is the major thing missing for MS Office, and I can't believe they haven't done it yet. Sure they have track changes, but you have to remember to turn that on. There's no reason you should have to track changes. You should be able to take two versions of the document and MS Word should be able to tell you what has changed between the two versions. I think that if OpenOffice developed this feature it would be a killer feature that might get people to actually start using it. Because as you pointed out, when you have 4 different versions of the same document from 4 different people, it's nice to be able to figure out which changes those 4 people actually made without going through all 50 pages of the document.

Re:How Much Would What Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pull only workflow, mailed patches, the way that the linux kernel was done for many years. No central server.