Version control

Most professional development teams and single developers nowadays use a version control system to keep track of their source code and associated change history. A version control system ensures that all previous versions of all files can be recreated later on; and all changes to a file can be traced over time.

Basically, it can answer what changes was made to which file, when, why and by whom. It can also explain what a file looked like on a specific date or at a specific release, as well as the differences between any two versions.

Version control systems also provides features like branching and merging of source code bases to aid parallel development, and developers can tag snapshots of various releases with descriptive names to know exaxtly what state the source code was in at a specific time (typically a release).

One of the most popular version control systems in the industry is Subversion (SVN), which was created to address some of the limitations in the previously very popular CVS.

Subversion is more or less an industry standard today, and used by many companies large and small. As an example, one of our customers is an aircraft manufacturer who uses Subversion successfully in a 100+ person project team with many million lines of source code in their aircraft-related software product.

Atollic TrueSTUDIO® fully supports users of both SVN and CVS with a highly integrated and very powerful version control systems GUI client. It allows developers to check-in and check-out files, branch and merge, browse the server repository, view file change histories, etc.

For Subversion, we have even integrated a graphical revision graph viewer that display charts on the development progress over time!

Subversion (SVN) and CVS are free-of-charge open-source software that can be installed in your team server for multi-developer situtions, as well as locally on your PC in single-developer settings.

For more information, read our white paper:

Manage embedded software with Subversion