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Ask HN: How can I get my team to adopt SCM?

2 points by christopheraden ↗ HN
I don't work among programmers. Everyone on my team has a statistics degree, and most only had one or two CS classes in their undergraduate (for many, this was 15-25 years ago) and do not follow any of the practices or paradigms of software engineering rigorously. I've recently been trying to get subversion (one other guy knows it) or git (I know it, it seems nicer for programming without internet access), but my coworkers and boss cannot see the need. Most programs are only written by one person, but viewed by more than a dozen others, who submit revisions and requests via email, sometimes merging their own code in by hand. What perks of SCM can I cite that my team would find beneficial, other than making merges easier (a rare task we need to do)?

4 comments

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kat
I think SCM tracks history a lot better than an inbox. Even when I am coding by myself, I like using source control so I can easily remember what I did two days ago. Also having a history makes it easier to remove buggy features or re-add features if business requirements change. Instead of searching through an inbox folder, just view the history of a single file.
christopheraden
This is the main reason I use git on my personal projects. I've found that it's quite difficult to pitch this feature to my group. The cost of learning an entirely new tech solution outweighs the benefits of version control in their minds--a statement I disagree. I have no killer feature for them in SCM that will make them want to start using it ASAP. Whether email is "good enough" has been made to be a matter of opinion, unfortunately.
username111
The number one perk for version control is... version control, there are always mistakes made or some fix that ends up breaking everything and if you don't have version control this becomes a giant pain in the ass but with it you just switch to or look at an older version and problem solved.

The added team working enhancements are always secondary to version control and if someone can't see the benefit of this it is going to be hard to argue.

mahesh_gkumar
Where is the source stored currently? On the hard disk of the one person who usually writes the code? If so, what happens if he quits? Or if his machine gets hacked? In short, if you loose your one copy of the code, what happens then? How do you restore your application/source.