Today I happened to see a file name with word 'new' on it on a presenter's computer. I was slightly amused because of my history. I can still see the old version naming convention in many "shared team folders" in our server. It goes something like this:
original
new
latest
final
I have been using version control system since my first university years (some fifteen years ago) and throughout my professional life. First it was just an advanced XCOPY method putting released versions of one man projects into the system, but about three years it has been collective code ownership and at least daily update-commit (we use CVS) cycles from the beginning of development. Lately we have adapted continuous integration and automated regression (confirmation) testing as you know. Currently we are looking for ways to add some automated acceptance and system testing as well.
During the past couple of years I have had a pleasure to work with software developed outside our own company. Quality of source varies a lot of course, but it is striking that version control typically is not even mentioned. In some occasions lately the software was delivered as zip'd folder with a version number in folder name - at that point I was happily surprised by that! Embedded firmware domain - based on my biased observations - walks some 10 years behind the mainstream software industry. The wide lack of basic discipline, version control, proves the point. I'm glad that I work in a department where I can say that developers would never go back working without version control.
I found this Yahoo group message - nostalgic.
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