上QQ阅读APP看书，第一时间看更新

Need for source code management

Let's take a real-world example of application development in a small company. The team is of two people initially. The team starts coding the application and keeps their code in their local machines.

At the end of the day, both the developers share their changes and integrate their code.

Everything goes fine at this point, because it is easy for two developers to check the files, merge their code, and copy files. After some time, two more people join the development team and now they need to manage and merge their code and make changes every day.

These are the challenges the team now face:

Code merge issues: Whenever new developers make changes in the code files, they'll have to share their files with five different developers. This could create a lot of unmanaged code changes that are not properly synced. In this manual process of code merging, it is possible that some changes might be missed.
Time wasted in manual checks: There is a lot of time wasted in the manual process of checking the code changes and making sure all the changes are merged, manual copy-pasting, and again verifying that everything is properly integrated, making sure no changes are missed, and then building again manually to ensure the changes do not fail the build.
No record of code changes: In the manual process of code merging, there is no record of the changes made by developers. There is a very high chance that a code change might break some functionality and it will not be discovered until late in the development process. There is no track of who made which change in the code, and this makes troubleshooting much more time-consuming and difficult.
No one place for the latest code: Because code is not regularly checked in to any central repository, it creates dependency over developers and makes it difficult to transfer codebases to new systems and teams.
Distributed development: When the team expands and becomes a distributed team working from different locations, which is quite normal in today's world, code merging and change tracking become a big challenge if you don't have a source code management solution. Developers make code changes from different places and need to merge them; this gets challenging since now they need to merge the code every day with all team members and it cannot be done by simple file sharing systems. A lot of tracking and merging is required in such a process.
Source versioning: Source versioning is another issue when talking about source code management. Without a SCM tool, developers would have to manually maintain folders of different versions of code and make sure everybody uses the same structure, and the integrations must be done in the same way. SCM tools solve this problem by providing options to make branches and tags for different releases and features, thus making the source versioning process simple, easy to follow, and seamless.

There are many such issues that require a code repository system to ensure code quality, track changes, seamlessly merge code, and integrate development between developers. This is where source code management and code repository systems come into play.