Best Practices when Committing Source Code

Submitted by Benjamin Bradley on .

Over the 10+ years that I've been writing source code and working with source control management (SCM) systems like git, subversion, and cvs, I've developed a set of best practices which boost the benefits of source control's history/tracking features and help to keep my code bases clean.

Source control management, or SCM, is used to track changes in files over time. Software source code evolves as new features are added and tracking the history makes it easy to go back (revert) to an earlier version of the code. SCM enables several people to update different areas of the code at the same time and have reasonable confidence that their changes will be compatible with each other. When you've finished your task you "check in" your changes which makes them available to everyone else. Since your changes can affect many other people working on the same project, including your future self (when you come back to update the code again later), paying extra attention to what you're publishing can make a big difference in keeping things stable, simple and readable. Here are some of the best practices that I've collected oven the years.

Read the rest of the post here: Committing code - best practices.