What is Source Code Management and How Can it Help You?

SCM tools help development teams in many ways:

• Collaboration: SCM tools prevent one user from accidentally overwriting the changes of another, allowing many developers to work on the same code without stepping one each other's toes.
• History: SCM tools track the complete development history of the software, including the exact changes which have occurred between releases and who made those changes.
• Release notes generation: Given the tracking of each change, the SCM can be used to generate notes for their software releases which accurately capture all of the changes included in the new release.
• Documentation and test management: SCM tools can be used to manage not just software source code, but also test suites and documentation for their software.
• Change notifications: To keep interested members of the team informed when changes occur to the source code.

Who uses SCM tools?

SCM tools are used by:

• Project developers who are writing source code.
• Project testers who need to download the very latest changes.
• Advanced users who want to try out code that is not yet stable, mature or released.

What SCM tools does SourceForge.net support?

• Subversion
• Git
• Mercurial
• Bazaar
• CVS