Why is it important to use a version control system also known as source control or revision control?
Please ask yourself:
| 1. | Have you ever had to maintain multiple versions of a product? |
| 2. | Have you ever lost code or had a backup that was too old? |
| 3. | Have you ever made a change to code and realized, it was a mistake and wanted to revert back? |
| 4. | Have you ever wanted to experiment with a new feature without interfering with working code? |
| 5. | Have you ever wanted to see the difference between two, or more, versions of your code? |
| 6. | Have you ever wanted to see how much work is being done, where, when and by whom? |
| 7. | Have you ever wanted to prove that a particular change broke or fixed a piece of code? |
| 8. | Have you ever wanted to share your code or let other people work on your code? |
| 9. | Have you ever wanted to submit a change to someone else’s code? |
| 10. | Have you ever wanted to review the history of some code? |
In these cases and if you have a group developing the same code, version control is necessary so people can edit the same file at the same time – which makes your life easier in every aspect.
And even if you work alone, you can benefit from source control as you will have:
- A history of all your changes.
- The ability to go back and forward in your code.
- The ability to experiment with the source code while still having a working version.
- A backup copy, especially if you use a different machine as source control server and even if that machine is regularly backed up.
- No need to comment out code as you can recover it any time.
Which Squish files should be version controlled
It is highly recommended using a version control system for the Squish test suite folders and the files contained in them.
Squish test suites consist of files for data files, shared data files, test scripts, shared scripts, verification point files and the object map file.
Recommended Version Control Software
We at froglogic use version control as well. Our software of choice is GIT, a open source version control system. It can handle everything from small to very large projects with efficiency and speed.
You can get Git here and there are even a few GUI Clients for a more platform-specific experience.