Evolving Beyond Version Control for Agile Development

exclusive check-out, although that tends to have significant effects on productivity.

The branching scheme used by many VC tools does work for individual files (e.g. version 1.2 is branched to 1.2.1.1), but does not scale well to groups of files (even hundreds, let alone thousands or tens of thousands). This is particularly true of merging, and merge tracking - a quite tricky problem to solve well, as evidenced by the fact that Subversion still has merge tracking on its medium term agenda rather than as an implemented facility.

We have all seen organisations where some level of parallel development was required, and as a result a complete copy of the repository was taken and development proceeded in its own little "branch". This leads to either divergence or some very painful merge scenarios, and a huge hit on productivity.

Conclusion
We haven't covered all the features of full CM tools, but the most important point is to understand the principles of CM, since you can then apply whatever tools you have to satisfying those principles. The challenge then becomes identifying those aspects of CM that are really important to you, and understanding the different levels of tool support and how they can make processes that were previously an out-of-reach mirage suddenly become attainable. Tool support really can make a big difference, but it comes a poor second to good understanding.

Because of the inherent discipline that test driven development involves, there are many agile teams successfully using CVS. Many have switched to Subversion and are benefiting from change-sets and better branching model.

But agile developers can seriously benefit further from making sure they are fully aware of what modern tools are capable of, and ensuring that they use best practice in applying those tools during development and maintenance.